Visualizing Urban Expansion and Preparing for More of It

Cities across the globe are growing in size and population at an astounding rate, and a team of researchers are looking at the past to prepare for what will happen next.

To do so, the researchers, based out of the NYU Stern School of Business, have created the Urbanization Project. Their hope is to use data visualizations (viewable below) to convince politicians to better plan for inevitable population growth.

The videos of Paris, Los Angeles, São Paulo and Chicago all chart at least 130 years of growth in less than a minute.