Track city populations through history!

Clicking a city traces its history on the graph. A line is full thickness where there is a population estimate near that year, and is thin where it is interpolating between distant estimates.

The timeline is stretched out for recent times and compressed for the distant past.

Historical populations are mostly from Stadestér, which compiles Chandler, Bairoch/Buringh, de Vries, Populstat and others. Early figures are estimates and often disagree between sources.

Each city's historical series runs out around 2000 and we switch to a metropolitan figure. The metropolitan area definition for most big cities comes from the EC/OECD functional urban areas, and the modern populations come from UN WUP 2025. For smaller cities we use WUP's urban centre alone, and in the United States we use US Census metropolitan statistical areas. Since the sources before 2000 sometimes measure the city proper instead of the metropolitan area, there is often a jump in the population at 2000, represented as a dashed line in the graph.

Basemap by OpenFreeMap from OpenStreetMap data, built with MapLibre GL.

Made by anita!