The data is from:

https://simplemaps.com/data/world-cities

We're proud to offer a simple, accurate and up-to-date database of the world's cities and towns. We've built it from the ground up using authoritative sources such as the NGIA, US Geological Survey, US Census Bureau, and NASA.

Our database is:

• Up-to-date: It was last refreshed on May 11, 2025.
• Comprehensive: Over 4 million unique cities and towns from every country in the world (about 48 thousand in basic database).
• Accurate: Cleaned and aggregated from official sources. Includes latitude and longitude coordinates.
• Simple: A single CSV file, concise field names, only one entry per city.

World Cities provides a basemap layer for the cities of the world. The cities include national capitals, provincial capitals, major population centers, and landmark cities. Population estimates are provided for those cities listed in open source data from the United Nations Statistics Division, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, and U.S. Census Bureau.

World Cities provides a base map layer of the cities for the world. The cities include national capitals, provincial capitals, major population centers, and landmark cities.

This map features boundaries and places for the World, including countries, 1st order administrative areas, and cities. The map layers are delivered as features, which you can click on for attribute information or re-symbolize as you choose.

The "Major Cities" layer is derived from the "World Cities" dataset provided by ArcGIS Data and Maps group as part of the global data layers made available for public use.

"Major cities" layer specifically contains National and Provincial capitals that have the highest population within their respective country. Cities were filtered based on the STATUS (“National capital”, “National and provincial capital”, “Provincial capital”, “National capital and provincial capital enclave”, and “Other”). Majority of these cities within larger countries have been filtered at the highest levels of POP_CLASS (“5,000,000 and greater” and “1,000,000 to 4,999,999”). However, China for example, was filtered with cities over 11 million people due to many highly populated cities. Population approximations are sourced from US Census and UN Data.

Disclaimer: The designations employed and the presentation of material at this site do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

Data publication: 2021-03-12

Citation:

Credits: ESRI, CIA World Factbook, GMI, NIMA, UN Data, UN Habitat, US Census Bureau

Contact points:

Resource Contact: ESRI - ArcGIS Data and Maps

Metadata Contact: Justeen De Ocampo

Resource constraints:

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC BY-NC- SA 3.0 IGO)

Online resources:

World Cities layer from ArcGIS Data & Maps

ArcGIS Data and Maps group background and available datasets.

A feature layer of world cities with labels, for illustrative purposes only for use as a reference layer. This feature layer is pointing to the Political_Map_World_Cities_Features layer provided by Maps.com. The symbology and labels were modified slightly in this version.This layer is used as a reference layer in NOAA NCEI's VIIRS Nighttime Imagery map viewer, displayed in the 3D global view.

This global accessibility map enumerates land-based travel time to the nearest densely-populated area for all areas between 85 degrees north and 60 degrees south for a nominal year 2015. Densely-populated areas are defined as contiguous areas with 1,500 or more inhabitants per square kilometre or a majority of built-up land cover types coincident with a population centre of at least 50,000 inhabitants. This map was produced through a collaboration between MAP (University of Oxford), Google, the European Union Joint Research Centre (JRC), and the University of Twente, Netherlands.The underlying datasets used to produce the map include roads (comprising the first ever global-scale use of Open Street Map and Google roads datasets), railways, rivers, lakes, oceans, topographic conditions (slope and elevation), landcover types, and national borders. These datasets were each allocated a speed or speeds of travel in terms of time to cross each pixel of that type. The datasets were then combined to produce a "friction surface"; a map where every pixel is allocated a nominal overall speed of travel based on the types occurring within that pixel. Least-cost-path algorithms (running in Google Earth Engine and, for high-latitude areas, in R) were used in conjunction with this friction surface to calculate the time of travel from all locations to the nearest (in time) city. The cities dataset used is the high-density-cover product created by the Global Human Settlement Project. Each pixel in the resultant accessibility map thus represents the modelled shortest time from that location to a city. Authors: D.J. Weiss, A. Nelson, H.S. Gibson, W. Temperley, S. Peedell, A. Lieber, M. Hancher, E. Poyart, S. Belchior, N. Fullman, B. Mappin, U. Dalrymple, J. Rozier, T.C.D. Lucas, R.E. Howes, L.S. Tusting, S.Y. Kang, E. Cameron, D. Bisanzio, K.E. Battle, S. Bhatt, and P.W. Gething. A global map of travel time to cities to assess inequalities in accessibility in 2015. (2018). Nature. doi:10.1038/nature25181

Processing notes: Data were processed from numerous sources including OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Land Cover mapping, and others, to generate a global friction surface of average land-based travel speed. This accessibility surface was then derived from that friction surface via a least-cost-path algorithm finding at each location the closest point from global databases of population centres and densely-populated areas. Please see the associated publication for full details of the processing.

Source: https://map.ox.ac.uk/research-project/accessibility_to_cities/

Planisphere with the location of the largest cities

In geography, an antipode is the exact other side of the world from any given location. When I was a kid, we always used to talk about digging a hole so deep that you'd exit in China. But we foolish Michigan kids didn't realize that if we really dug a hole straight down, presuming we survived the magnificent heat of Earth's core, eventually we'd pop out at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean and drown.Antipodes can be a fun and engaging teaching mechanism for geography students. It helps us...wrap...our minds around our roundish planet, and it burns some spatial thinking calories.This layer is sourced from Natural Earth, and was converted into an antipode version of itself via this process.Here is an Antipode World Countries polygon layer.

Mature Support Notice: This item is in mature support as of July 2021. A new version of this item is available for your use. Esri recommends updating your maps and apps to use the new version. This map is designed to be used as a general reference map for informational and educational purposes as well as a basemap by GIS professionals and other users for creating web maps and web mapping applications.To launch a web map containing this map layer, click here.The map was developed by National Geographic and Esri and reflects the distinctive National Geographic cartographic style in a multi-scale reference map of the world. The map was authored using data from a variety of leading data providers, including Garmin, HERE, UNEP-WCMC, NASA, ESA, USGS, and others.This reference map includes administrative boundaries, cities, protected areas, highways, roads, railways, water features, buildings and landmarks, overlaid on shaded relief and land cover imagery for added context. The map includes global coverage down to ~1:144k scale and more detailed coverage for North America down to ~1:9k scale. Here's a ready-to-use web map that uses the National Geographic World Map as its basemap. Map Note: Although small-scale boundaries, place names and map notes were provided and edited by National Geographic, boundaries and names shown do not necessarily reflect the map policy of the National Geographic Society, particularly at larger scales where content has not been thoroughly reviewed or edited by National Geographic.Data Notes: The credits below include a list of data providers used to develop the map. Below are a few additional notes:Reference Data: National Geographic, Esri, Garmin, HERE, INCREMENT P, NRCAN, METILand Cover Imagery: NASA Blue Marble, ESA GlobCover 2009 (Copyright notice: © ESA 2010 and UCLouvain)Protected Areas: IUCN and UNEP-WCMC (2011), The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) Annual Release. Cambridge, UK: UNEP-WCMC. Available at: www.protectedplanet.net.Ocean Data: GEBCO, NOAA

Reference values from [18] are provided in the top row, mean and standard deviation (St. Dev.) across all Urban Atlas cities are provided on top of the individual city listings.

The Human Geography Map (World Edition) web map provides a detailed vector basemap with a monochromatic style and content adjusted to support Human Geography information. Where possible, the map content has been adjusted so that it observes WCAG contrast criteria.This basemap, included in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, uses 3 vector tile layers:Human Geography Label, a label reference layer including cities and communities, countries, administrative units, and at larger scales street names.Human Geography Detail, a detail reference layer including administrative boundaries, roads and highways, and larger bodies of water. This layer is designed to be used with a high degree of transparency so that the detail does not compete with your information. It is set at approximately 50% in this web map, but can be adjusted.Human Geography Base, a simple basemap consisting of land areas in a very light gray only.The vector tile layers in this web map are built using the same data sources used for other Esri Vector Basemaps. For details on data sources contributed by the GIS community, view the map of Community Maps Basemap Contributors. Esri Vector Basemaps are updated monthly.Learn more about this basemap from the cartographic designer in Introducing a Human Geography Basemap.Use this MapThis map is designed to be used as a basemap for overlaying other layers of information or as a stand-alone reference map. You can add layers to this web map and save as your own map. If you like, you can add this web map to a custom basemap gallery for others in your organization to use in creating web maps. If you would like to add this map as a layer in other maps you are creating, you may use the tile layer item referenced in this map.

This National Geographic Style Map (World Edition) web map provides a reference map for the world that includes administrative boundaries, cities, protected areas, highways, roads, railways, water features, buildings, and landmarks, overlaid on shaded relief and a colorized physical ecosystems base for added context to conservation and biodiversity topics. Alignment of boundaries is a presentation of the feature provided by our data vendors and does not imply endorsement by Esri, National Geographic or any governing authority.This basemap, included in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, uses the National Geographic Style vector tile layer and the National Geographic Style Base and World Hillshade raster tile layers.The vector tile layer in this web map is built using the same data sources used for other Esri Vector Basemaps. For details on data sources contributed by the GIS community, view the map of Community Maps Basemap Contributors. Esri Vector Basemaps are updated monthly.Use this MapThis map is designed to be used as a basemap for overlaying other layers of information or as a stand-alone reference map. You can add layers to this web map and save as your own map. If you like, you can add this web map to a custom basemap gallery for others in your organization to use in creating web maps. If you would like to add this map as a layer in other maps you are creating, you may use the tile layers referenced in this map.

This dataset includes a total of 635 annotated image patches from historical city maps. It is designed for the semantic segmentation of the maps into 5 semantic classes (building blocks, non-built, water, road network, background frame). 330 patches are taken from maps of the city of Paris, while the 305 others are taken from a balanced corpus of city maps from 90 countries all around the world.

Please read the detailed informations about data collection methodology, associated metadata and annotation ontology in README.md hereunder :

This map features the locations of the major cities of Africa, displayed at multiple scale levels. The layers are a filtered view of the World Cities layer, with just the cities intersecting with the continent of Africa.The popup for the layer includes a dynamic link to Wikipedia, using an Arcade expression.

Labeling: cities, villages. Map type: Symbols. Spatial extents: World, Switzerland. Time: 2014

This vector tile layer presents the World Street Map (Local Language) style (World Edition) and provides a basemap for the world, symbolized with a classic Esri street map style. This comprehensive street map includes highways, major roads, minor roads, railways, water features, cities, parks, landmarks, building footprints, and administrative boundaries. Labels are in local languages at large scale. This vector tile layer provides unique capabilities for customization, high-resolution display, and use in mobile devices.This vector tile layer is built using the same data sources used for other Esri Vector Basemaps. For details on data sources contributed by the GIS community, view the map of Community Maps Basemap Contributors. Esri Vector Basemaps are updated monthly.This layer is used in the Streets (Local Language) web map included in ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.See the Vector Basemaps group for other vector tile layers. Customize this StyleLearn more about customizing this vector basemap style using the Vector Tile Style Editor. Additional details are available in ArcGIS Online Blogs and the Esri Vector Basemaps Reference Document.

This map is designed to be used as a basemap by GIS professionals and as a reference map by anyone. The map includes administrative boundaries, cities, water features, physiographic features, parks, landmarks, highways, roads, railways, and airports overlaid on land cover and shaded relief imagery for added context. The map provides coverage for the world down to a scale of ~1:72k. Coverage is provided down to ~1:4k for the following areas: Australia and New Zealand; India; Europe; Canada; Mexico; the continental United States and Hawaii; South America and Central America; Africa; and most of the Middle East. Coverage down to ~1:1k and ~1:2k is available in select urban areas. This basemap was compiled from a variety of best available sources from several data providers, including the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. National Park Service (NPS), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Department of Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN), GeoBase, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Garmin, HERE, Esri, OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS User Community. For more information on this map, including our terms of use, visit us online at http://goto.arcgisonline.com/maps/World_Topo_Map

Cities are major drivers of environmental change at all scales and are especially at risk from the ensuing effects, which include poor air quality, flooding and heat waves. Typically, these issues are studied on a city-by-city basis owing to the spatial complexity of built landscapes, local topography and emission patterns. However, to ensure knowledge sharing and to integrate local-scale processes with regional and global scale modelling initiatives, there is a pressing need for a world-wide database on cities that is suited for environmental studies. In this paper we present a European database that has a particular focus on characterising urbanised landscapes. It has been derived using tools and techniques developed as part of the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) project, which has the goal of acquiring and disseminating climate-relevant information on cities worldwide. The European map is the first major step toward creating a global database on cities that can be integrated with existing topographic and natural land-cover databases to support modelling initiatives.

Contained within the Atlas of Canada's Reference Map Series, 1961 to 2010, is a map that shows international boundaries (and their status) current to January 2000. By means of capital type (for sovereign country names) and upper-lower type (for dependencies), the map indicates the status of all parts of the World. Places and geographical features within countries use local versions of names. However, a table on the map gives the commonly-used versions of some of these names. Populated places are shown in three size classes. The map has a table giving air distances between major cities and a table listing two-letter abbreviations for selected countries.