Here we used remote sensing data from multiple sources (time-series of Landsat and Sentinel images) to map the impervious surface area (ISA) at five-year intervals from 1990 to 2015, and then converted the results into a standardized dataset of the built-up area for 433 Chinese cities with 300,000 inhabitants or more, which were listed in the United Nations (UN) World Urbanization Prospects (WUP) database (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan). We employed a range of spectral indices to generate the 1990–2015 ISA maps in urban areas based on remotely sensed data acquired from multiple sources. In this process, various types of auxiliary data were used to create the desired products for urban areas through manual segmentation of peri-urban and rural areas together with reference to several freely available products of urban extent derived from ISA data using automated urban–rural segmentation methods. After that, following the well-established rules adopted by the UN, we carried out the conversion to the standardized built-up area products from the 1990–2015 ISA maps in urban areas, which conformed to the definition of urban agglomeration area (UAA). Finally, we implemented data postprocessing to guarantee the spatial accuracy and temporal consistency of the final product.The standardized urban built-up area dataset (SUBAD–China) introduced here is the first product using the same definition of UAA adopted by the WUP database for 433 county and higher-level cities in China. The comparisons made with contemporary data produced by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the World Bank and UN-habitat indicate that our results have a high spatial accuracy and good temporal consistency and thus can be used to characterize the process of urban expansion in China.The SUBAD–China contains 2,598 vector files in shapefile format containing data for all China's cities listed in the WUP database that have different urban sizes and income levels with populations over 300,000. Attached with it, we also provided the distribution of validation points for the 1990–2010 ISA products of these 433 Chinese cities in shapefile format and the confusion matrices between classified data and reference data during different time periods as a Microsoft Excel Open XML Spreadsheet (XLSX) file.Furthermore, The standardized built-up area products for such cities will be consistently updated and refined to ensure the quality of their spatiotemporal coverage and accuracy. The production of this dataset together with the usage of population counts derived from the WUP database will close some of the data gaps in the calculation of SDG11.3.1 and benefit other downstream applications relevant to a combined analysis of the spatial and socio-economic domains in urban areas.

Replication data for Henderson, J. Vernon, Adam Storeygard, and Uwe Deichmann. "Has climate change driven urbanization in Africa?." Journal of Development Economics 124 (2017): 60-82. Data include climate variables, conflict events, industry by district, urban/rural population, and distance to coast. This paper documents a substantial impact of climate variation on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa. In a panel of over 350 subnational regions, we find that drier conditions increase urbanization in places most likely to have an urban industrial base. Total city income in such places also increases. When receiving cities have a traded good sector that is not wholly dependent upon local agriculture, migration to cities provides an “escape” from negative agricultural moisture shocks. However, in most places (75% of our sample) without an industrial base, there is no escape into alternative export-based employment. Drying causes reduced urban and rural incomes, with little overall impact on the urban population share. Finally, the paper shows that climate variation also induces employment changes within the rural sector itself. Drier conditions induce a shift out of farm activities, especially for women, into non-farm activities, and especially out of the measured work force. Overall, these findings imply a strong link between climate and urbanization in Africa. This dataset is part of the Global Research Program on Spatial Development of Cities funded by the Multi-Donor Trust Fund on Sustainable Urbanization of the World Bank and supported by the U.K. Department for International Development.

Urban rats are notorious invasive pests that thrive in cities by exploiting the resources accompanying high human population density. Identifying long-term trends in rat numbers and how they are shaped by environmental changes is critical for understanding their ecology, and projecting future vulnerabilities and mitigation needs. Here, we use trend analyses of public complaint and inspection data in 16 cities around the world to estimate trends in commensal rat populations. Eleven of 16 cities (69%) had significant increasing trends in rat numbers, including Washington D.C., New York, and Amsterdam. Just three cities experienced declines. Cities experiencing greater temperature increases over time saw larger increases in rat numbers. Cities with more dense human populations and more urbanization also saw larger increases in rats. Warming temperatures and more people living in cities may be expanding the seasonal activity periods and food resource availability for urban rats. Cities will have to integrate the biological impacts of these variables into any future management strategies.

Proportion of population living in Urban and Rural areas for the Pacific Island and Territories. The Degree of Urbanization classifies the entire territory of a country along the urban-rural continuum.

Find more Pacific data on PDH.stat.

Cities ranking and mega citiesTokyo is the world’s largest city with an agglomeration of 37 million inhabitants, followed by New Delhi with 29 million, Shanghai with 26 million, and Mexico City and São Paulo, each with around 22 million inhabitants. Today, Cairo, Mumbai, Beijing and Dhaka all have close to 20 million inhabitants. By 2020, Tokyo’s population is projected to begin to decline, while Delhi is projected to continue growing and to become the most populous city in the world around 2028.By 2030, the world is projected to have 43 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants, most of them in developing regions. However, some of the fastest-growing urban agglomerations are cities with fewer than 1 million inhabitants, many of them located in Asia and Africa. While one in eight people live in 33 megacities worldwide, close to half of the world’s urban dwellers reside in much smaller settlements with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants.About the dataThe 2018 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects is published by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA). It has been issued regularly since 1988 with revised estimates and projections of the urban and rural populations for all countries of the world, and of their major urban agglomerations. The data set and related materials are available at: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/

The data in this release describe various aspects of the impacts of urbanization on evapotranspiration at local to global spatial scales. This data release is associated with the publication of these results in a concurrent journal article. Analyses in the journal article included comparisons between urban and non-urban ET in a variety of climate settings and spatial scales. Urbanization has been shown to locally increase the nighttime temperatures creating urban heat islands, which partly arise due to evapotranspiration (ET) reduction. It is unclear how the direction and magnitude of the change in local ET due to urbanization varies globally across different climatic regimes. This knowledge gap is critical, both for the key role of ET in the water cycle accounting for the majority of local precipitation, and for the high socioeconomic value of urban landscapes, where water resources are often in high demand. We explore and assess the impacts of urbanization on ET across a range of landscapes from local to global spatial scales, and monthly to mean annual timescales. Remotely sensed land cover and ET available at 1 km resolution are used to quantify the differences in ET between urban and surrounding non-urban areas across the globe. The observed patterns show the difference between urban and nonurban ET can be estimated to first order as a function of local hydroclimate with arid (humid) regions seeing increased (decreased) ET due to urbanization. Cities under cold climates also evaporate more than their non-urban surroundings during the winter as the urban micro-climate has increased energy availability resulting from human activity. Increased ET in arid cities clearly arises from municipal water withdrawals and increased irrigation during drought conditions further increases the ET from arid urban cities compared to non-urban ET. This information can help to inform planners for improved environmental conditions in designing urban landscapes. This data set will be updated with the full journal article citation when available. See also the metadata file for additional information, or contact the authors with questions.

This map shows the historical housing unit change in consistent 2010 census tract boundaries from 1940 to 2019. In many cities over that time period—especially in the 1950s and 1960s—federal, state, and local governments demolished thousands of housing units as part of their "urban renewal" programs. These neighborhoods were typically in the older parts of city centers, contained lower income populations, and had higher shares of Black, Hispanic, and immigrant residents than their respective cities. Homes were typically replaced with new interstate highways and thoroughfares, stadiums, civic buildings, parking lots, high rises, rights of way, and other non-residential uses. In a fraction of cases, homes were replaced with public housing. Many of these areas show up as red on this map because they still have not regained the level of housing they had before World War II.Urban renewal is not the only reason for housing loss. Many tracts in places that have been undergoing population decline—especially cities in the North and Midwest and many rural communities—have also lost considerable amounts of housing over this time period.On the other side of things, many suburban and exurban areas—especially in the South and West—have experienced significant population and housing unit growth. These places show up as blue on this map.The data used to make this map comes from the Historical Housing Unit and Urbanization Database 2010, or HHUUD10. To read more on the methodologies used to estimate the housing unit counts, please refer to the methods paper. To download the data in tabular form, please visit the data repository. To download the feature layer used to make this map or read about the attributes, see the feature layer. Please also remember that these data are estimates and are therefore imperfect. They should be treated like all interpolated data: with caution and a healthy dose of skepticism.Citation:Markley, S.N., Holloway, S.R., Hafley, T.J., Hauer, M.E. 2022. Housing unit and urbanization estimates for the continental U.S. in consistent tract boundaries, 1940–2019. Scientific Data 9 (82). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01184-x

In 2023, Washington, D.C. had the highest population density in the United States, with 11,130.69 people per square mile. As a whole, there were about 94.83 residents per square mile in the U.S., and Alaska was the state with the lowest population density, with 1.29 residents per square mile. The problem of population density Simply put, population density is the population of a country divided by the area of the country. While this can be an interesting measure of how many people live in a country and how large the country is, it does not account for the degree of urbanization, or the share of people who live in urban centers. For example, Russia is the largest country in the world and has a comparatively low population, so its population density is very low. However, much of the country is uninhabited, so cities in Russia are much more densely populated than the rest of the country. Urbanization in the United States While the United States is not very densely populated compared to other countries, its population density has increased significantly over the past few decades. The degree of urbanization has also increased, and well over half of the population lives in urban centers.

The rural-urban commuting area codes (RUCA) classify U.S. census tracts using measures of urbanization, population density, and daily commuting from the decennial census.

The most recent RUCA codes are based on data from the 2000 decennial census. The classification contains two levels. Whole numbers (1-10) delineate metropolitan, micropolitan, small town, and rural commuting areas based on the size and direction of the primary (largest) commuting flows. These 10 codes are further subdivided to permit stricter or looser delimitation of commuting areas, based on secondary (second largest) commuting flows. The approach errs in the direction of more codes, providing flexibility in combining levels to meet varying definitional needs and preferences.

The 1990 codes are similarly defined. However, the Census Bureau's methods of defining urban cores and clusters changed between the two censuses. And, census tracts changed in number and shapes. The 2000 rural-urban commuting codes are not directly comparable with the 1990 codes because of these differences.

An update of the Rural-Urban Commuting Area Codes is planned for late 2013.This record was taken from the USDA Enterprise Data Inventory that feeds into the https://data.gov catalog. Data for this record includes the following resources: Webpage with links to Excel files For complete information, please visit https://data.gov.

This article introduces a new, public database of U.S. state and local public policies, now available at www.statepolicyindex.com. The database covers more than 170 different state or local policies, coded at the state level as of December 31, 2006, in most cases. We use principal components analysis and derive two orthogonal measures of state policy ideology, which we label policy liberalism and policy urbanism. Our policy liberalism measure passes several reliability and validity checks, while policy urbanism is strongly predicted by urbanization rate, percentage of African Americans in the population, and percentage of Christian adherents in the population.

ObjectiveThe contribution of unhealthy dietary patterns to the epidemic of obesity has been well recognized. Differences in availability of foods may have an important influence on individual eating behaviors and health disparities. This study examined the availability of food stores and food service places by city characteristics on city level of income and urbanization.MethodsThe cross-sectional survey was comprised of two parts: (1) an on-site observation to measure availability of food stores and food service places in 12 cities of China; (2) an in-store survey to determine the presence of fresh/frozen vegetables or fruits in all food stores. Trained investigators walked all the streets/roads within study tracts to identify all the food outlets. An observational survey questionnaire was used in all food stores to determine the presence of fresh/frozen vegetables or fruits. Urbanization index was determined for each city using a principal components factor analysis. City level of income and urbanization and numbers of each type of food stores and food service places were examined using negative binomial regression models.ResultsLarge-sized supermarkets and specialty retailers had higher number of fresh/frozen vegetables or fruits sold compared to small/medium-sized markets. High-income versus low-income, high urbanized versus low urbanized areas had significantly more large-sized supermarkets and fewer small/medium-sized markets. In terms of restaurants, high urbanized cities had more western fast food restaurants and no statistically significant difference in the relative availability of any type of restaurants was found between high- and low-income areas.ConclusionsThe findings suggested food environment disparities did exist in different cities of China.

20 year Projected Urban Growth scenarios. Base year is 2000. Projected year in this dataset is 2020.

By 2020, most forecasters agree, California will be home to between 43 and 46 million residents-up from 35 million today. Beyond 2020 the size of California's population is less certain. Depending on the composition of the population, and future fertility and migration rates, California's 2050 population could be as little as 50 million or as much as 70 million. One hundred years from now, if present trends continue, California could conceivably have as many as 90 million residents.

Where these future residents will live and work is unclear. For most of the 20th Century, two-thirds of Californians have lived south of the Tehachapi Mountains and west of the San Jacinto Mountains-in that part of the state commonly referred to as Southern California. Yet most of coastal Southern California is already highly urbanized, and there is relatively little vacant land available for new development. More recently, slow-growth policies in Northern California and declining developable land supplies in Southern California are squeezing ever more of the state's population growth into the San Joaquin Valley.

How future Californians will occupy the landscape is also unclear. Over the last fifty years, the state's population has grown increasingly urban. Today, nearly 95 percent of Californians live in metropolitan areas, mostly at densities less than ten persons per acre. Recent growth patterns have strongly favored locations near freeways, most of which where built in the 1950s and 1960s. With few new freeways on the planning horizon, how will California's future growth organize itself in space? By national standards, California's large urban areas are already reasonably dense, and economic theory suggests that densities should increase further as California's urban regions continue to grow. In practice, densities have been rising in some urban counties, but falling in others.

These are important issues as California plans its long-term future. Will California have enough land of the appropriate types and in the right locations to accommodate its projected population growth? Will future population growth consume ever-greater amounts of irreplaceable resource lands and habitat? Will jobs continue decentralizing, pushing out the boundaries of metropolitan areas? Will development densities be sufficient to support mass transit, or will future Californians be stuck in perpetual gridlock? Will urban and resort and recreational growth in the Sierra Nevada and Trinity Mountain regions lead to the over-fragmentation of precious natural habitat? How much water will be needed by California's future industries, farms, and residents, and where will that water be stored? Where should future highway, transit, and high-speed rail facilities and rights-of-way be located? Most of all, how much will all this growth cost, both economically, and in terms of changes in California's quality of life?

Clearly, the more precise our current understanding of how and where California is likely to grow, the sooner and more inexpensively appropriate lands can be acquired for purposes of conservation, recreation, and future facility siting. Similarly, the more clearly future urbanization patterns can be anticipated, the greater our collective ability to undertake sound city, metropolitan, rural, and bioregional planning.

Consider two scenarios for the year 2100. In the first, California's population would grow to 80 million persons and would occupy the landscape at an average density of eight persons per acre, the current statewide urban average. Under this scenario, and assuming that 10% percent of California's future population growth would occur through infill-that is, on existing urban land-California's expanding urban population would consume an additional 5.06 million acres of currently undeveloped land. As an alternative, assume the share of infill development were increased to 30%, and that new population were accommodated at a density of about 12 persons per acre-which is the current average density of the City of Los Angeles. Under this second scenario, California's urban population would consume an additional 2.6 million acres of currently undeveloped land. While both scenarios accommodate the same amount of population growth and generate large increments of additional urban development-indeed, some might say even the second scenario allows far too much growth and development-the second scenario is far kinder to California's unique natural landscape.

This report presents the results of a series of baseline population and urban growth projections for California's 38 urban counties through the year 2100. Presented in map and table form, these projections are based on extrapolations of current population trends and recent urban development trends. The next section, titled Approach, outlines the methodology and data used to develop the various projections. The following section, Baseline Scenario, reviews the projections themselves. A final section, entitled Baseline Impacts, quantitatively assesses the impacts of the baseline projections on wetland, hillside, farmland and habitat loss.

These data were originally assembled for a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, which has now been published as a monograph. If you would like to cite this material, please refer to my book: Hanson, J. W., (2016), An Urban Geography of the Roman World, 100 B.C. to A.D. 300, (Oxford: Archaeopress). More information about how urbanism was defined, how the catalogue was compiled, how the size of the inhabited area of each site was measured, and other details can be found in the same work. These data are not intended to be final and reflect the state of knowledge in the field in 2016.

The dataset covers the North Sea region (Great Britain, Netherlands, Belgium and part of France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany) and is made up of GIS vector-files consisting of three parts: 1. Population numbers of (approximately) 100 cities with the highest population, for reference years 1300, 1500, 1700, 1850, 1900, 1950, 1990 and 2015; 2. Primary infrastructures on water, land and rail for reference years 1500, 1900 and 2015; 3. Soil types for reference years 1500, 1900 and 2015. The data sets have been compiled on the basis of existing European datasets and literature, supplemented with further literature and data research. Together the datasets provide a more detailed insight into the urbanization process around the North Sea from 1300 to 2015. The datasets on soil and infrastructure should be considered as a first attempt (version 1) to map these data for the North Sea region for three different reference years.

This dataset may be a mix of two years and is updated as the data is released for each county. For example, one county may have data from 2014 while a neighboring county may have had a more recent release of 2016 data. For specific years, please check the service that specifies the year, i.e. California Important Farmland: 2016.Established in 1982, Government Code Section 65570 mandates FMMP to biennially report on the conversion of farmland and grazing land, and to provide maps and data to local government and the public.The Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program (FMMP) provides data to decision makers for use in planning for the present and future use of California's agricultural land resources. The data is a current inventory of agricultural resources. This data is for general planning purposes and has a minimum mapping unit of ten acres.

Contains data from the World Bank's data portal. There is also a consolidated country dataset on HDX.

Cities can be tremendously efficient. It is easier to provide water and sanitation to people living closer together, while access to health, education, and other social and cultural services is also much more readily available. However, as cities grow, the cost of meeting basic needs increases, as does the strain on the environment and natural resources. Data on urbanization, traffic and congestion, and air pollution are from the United Nations Population Division, World Health Organization, International Road Federation, World Resources Institute, and other sources.

This dataset is a research outcome of a European Research Council, Starting Grant funded (Grant Number 679097, Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850-2000, UrbanOccupationsOETR) project. It contains a mid-nineteenth-century urban Ottoman population micro dataset for the city of Bursa.

In recent decades, a "big microdata revolution" has revolutionized access to transcribed historical census data for social science research. Despite this, the population records of the Ottoman Empire, spanning Southeastern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa, remained absent from the big microdata ecosystem due to their prolonged inaccessibility. In fact, like other modernizing states in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire started to enumerate its population in population registers (nüfus defterleri) in 1830, which recorded only males of all ages for conscription and taxation purposes. These registers were completed and updated in two waves, one in 1830-1838 and the other in the 1839-1865 period. Following this experience, the Empire implemented its first modern census, which included females, in 1881/1882 for more comprehensive statistical and governance reasons to converge with European census-taking practices and account for the increasing participation of females in economic and social spheres.

The pre-census population registers were opened to researchers in 2011. There are around 11.000 registers today. The microdata of the late Ottoman censuses is still not available. Still, unfortunately, the majority of the existing literature using the population registers superficially utilized and failed to tabulate the microdata. Most works using these valuable sources contented with transcribing the microdata from Ottoman to Latin script and presenting their data in raw and unstyled fashion without publishing them in a separate repository.

Our dataset marks the inaugural release of complete population data for an Ottoman urban center, the city of Bursa, derived from the 1839 population registers. It presents originally non-tabulated register data in a tabular format integrated into a relational Microsoft Access database. To ensure that our dataset is more accessible, we are also releasing the dataset in Microsoft Excel format.

The city of Bursa, a major cosmopolitan commercial hub in modern northwestern Turkey, is selected from the larger UrbanOccupationsOETR project database as an exemplary case to represent the volume, value, variety, and veracity of the population data. Furthermore, since urban areas are usually the most densely populated locations that attract the most migration in any country, they are attractive locations for multifold reasons in historical demography. Bursa is not the only urban location in the UrbanOccupationsOETR database. As it focused on urbanization and occupational structural change, it collected the population microdata on major urban centers (chosen as primary locations) and towns (denoted as secondary locations), which pioneered the economic development of post-Ottoman nation-states. What makes the city of Bursa’s data more advantageous than other cities is that it has been cleaned and validated multiple times and used elsewhere for demographic and economic analyses.

The Ottoman population registers of 1830 and 1839 classified the population under the commonly and officially recognized ethnoreligious identities- Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Armenian, Catholic, Jewish, and (Muslim and non-Muslim) Roma. Muslim and non-Muslim populations were counted in separate registers. The registers were organized along spatial and temporal lines. The standard unit of the register was the quarter (mahalle) in urban and village (karye) in rural settings. Within these register units, populated public and non-household spaces such as inns, dervish lodges, monasteries, madrasas, coffeehouses, bakeries, mills, pastures (of nomads), and large private farms (çiftlik) were recorded separately.

The household (menzil/hane) was the unit of entry, which sometimes took different forms depending on the context, such as the room for inns and the tent for nomads. Each household recorded its members on a horizontal line. The variables of male individuals inhabiting them were self-reported biographical information (names, titles/family names, ages, and occupations), physical description (height and facial hair), relationships with other household members (kinship, tenancy, and employment ties), infirmities, and military and poll tax status, including the reasons for exemption, military post, and poll tax category (high-ala, medium-evsat, and small-edna). Households with no inhabitants were differentiated. At the same time, if a resident was known to be absent during registration due to reasons such as military service or migration, he was recorded in his household with a note stating that reason. If he was missing and appeared later, he was added to the household during updates with a note like “not recorded previously” (e.g., hin-i tahrirde taşrada olub) or “newly recorded” (tahrir-mande).

In addition to the permanent residents of a given location, migrant/temporary non-local (yabancı) residents such as laborers, inn-stayers, and unskilled bachelors (bî-kâr) were recorded along with their place of origin and for how long they had been in the migrated place. Non-Muslim migrants were registered with information regarding the last location where they got their poll tax certificate and if they would make their next poll tax payment in the migrated location.

Updates were made mainly to births, deaths, migrations, and military and poll tax status. No other variables, such as age, were renewed except for occupations in a limited number of cases. Updates are easily identifiable since they were written in siyakat, a special Ottoman chancery shorthand script, and occasionally in red ink. Births were specified with newborns’ names added next to the father’s entry. Deaths were updated by crossing out the deceased person’s record. Migrations were added with a description of the migrated place (including the military branch if the person was conscripted). Military and poll tax status was updated by crossing out the old category and adding the new one next to it. Updates were usually expressed in hijri years, sometimes in month-year, and rarely in day-month-year fashion. It is important to note that since updates were made once every few months, these dates may reflect their registration date rather than giving the exact time of the events. Equally crucial is that many events, especially births, were not reported, so their quality is limited.

Modeled after the way information was contained in the population registers, this relational database has two tables, “tblHouse” and “tblIndividual.” Each table categorizes and standardizes the register variables. To make the data easier to use, the dataset also includes a query “Query_InnerJoin” that combines all the variables from each table in a separate sheet.

Given Bursa’s important place in Ottoman history, our dataset serves as a large and crucial resource for comprehending historical societal, economic, and demographic trends within the Empire in the early stages of globalization. The dataset has 8391 household entries (HouseID) and 19,186 individual (IndivID) entries. This data includes the population registered in all of Bursa’s quarters and other location categories in 1839 and the updates until and including 1843 (Figure 2). The ethno-religious breakdown of the total population is 12462 Muslims (65%), 3315 Armenians (17%), 2466 Orthodox Christians (13%), 749 Jews (4%), and 194 Catholics (1%).

To broaden access and use of our data and bring it more in line with findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) data guidelines, the variables of “tblHouse” and “tblIndividual” are sorted into general categories and described in detail in the following tables. As the variables indicate, the dataset and population registers, in general, could serve to formulate unprecedented, hitherto impossible research questions related to major demographic dynamics, i.e., household size and composition, ethnoreligious differences, population density, occupational structure, intergenerational mobility and status transfer, mortality, fertility, migration, age-heaping/human capital, conscription, settlement patterns within and across urban locations, onomastics, toponymy, etc.

Table 1: Categories and descriptions of the variables of tblHouse

This service provides a tract-level dataset illustrating the outcome of machine learning techniques applied to neighborhood classification reported by the American Housing Survey (AHS) as either urban, suburban, or rural. Definitions of “urban” and “rural” are abundant in government, academic literature, and data-driven journalism. Equally abundant are debates about what is urban or rural and which factors should be used to define these terms. Absent from most of this discussion is evidence about how people perceive or describe their neighborhood. Moreover, as several housing and demographic researchers have noted, the lack of an official or unofficial definition of suburban obscures the stylized fact that a majority of Americans live in a suburban setting. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development added a simple question to the 2017 American Housing Survey (AHS) asking respondents to describe their neighborhood as urban, suburban, or rural.

Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable : The 2017 World Risk Report identified the Pacific as the region of highest risk, measured over a five-year timeframe; In the last three years, the Pacific has faced a number of disaster events causing significant economic impacts, injury and loss of life. Post-disaster needs assessments indicated significant damages and losses, equivalent to 30% of national GDP in Fiji (2016), and 64% in Vanuatu (2015) for example.

Find more Pacific data on PDH.stat.

We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbaniza- tion observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to our most conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato accounts for approximately one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900. Additional evidence from within-country comparisons of city populations and adult heights also confirms the cross-country findings.