The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the World Bank have released a new map of Global Time Travel to Major Cities as part of a broader effort to define and understand the process of global urbanization. Developed at the EC Joint Centre’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability and published in the World Bank’s just released World Development Report 2009, the map helps to summarize data which elucidate a variety of economic, physical and social challenges we face in the rapidly changing global human environment.
Science Daily, in Urbanization: 95% of the World’s Population Lives on 10% of the Land, summarizes some of the key findings illustrated by the map:
* we passed the point at which more than half the world’s populations live in cities around the turn of the Millennium (2000) – much earlier than the 2007/8 estimate
* more than half of the world’s population lives less than 1 hour from a major city, but the breakdown is 85% of the developed world and only 35% of the developing world
* 95% of the world’s population is concentrated on just 10% of the world’s land; but only 10% of the world’s land area is classified as “remote” or more than 48 hours from a large city
For the full text of the World Bank report, look here.