New iPad App: Urban World

The McKinsey Global Institute just released a fascinating new iPad app, Urban World. Urban World provides users with a visually engaging way to explore urbanization for over 2,600 cities. You can read more about the project in detail right here.

The app also places urbanization in a historical context, using a view from space of the global nighttime distribution of light as a proxy for the global distribution of economic activity. Users can visualize the world’s shifting center of economic gravity during the past two millennia, to 2025. The app serves a purpose similar to a 16th-century map—a rough but helpful tool to help navigate the evolving urban world.

UrbanWorldApp_01

The above graphic compares the entire population of Europe to the population of China.

UrbanWorldApp_02

The graphic above shows that in 2010 the GDP of Los Angeles exceeded that of the entire country of Indonesia.

 

UrbanWorldApp_03

UrbanWorldApp_04

One comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *