Travel time to major cities: A global map of
Accessibility.
The world is shrinking. Cheap flights, large scale commercial
shipping and expanding road networks, only 10% of the land area is remote – more
than 48 hours from a large city.This means that we are
better connected to everywhere else than ever before. But global
travel and international trade and just two of the forces that have
reshaped our world. A new map of Travel Time to Major Cities -
developed by the European Commission and the World Bank - captures
this connectivity and the concentration of economic activity and
also highlights that there is little wilderness left. The map shows
how accessible some parts of the world have become whilst other
regions have remained isolated. Accessibility - whether it is to
markets, schools, hospitals or water - is a precondition for the
satisfaction of almost any economic need. Furthermore, accessibility
is relevant at all levels, from local development to global trade
and this map fills an important gap in our understanding of the
spatial patterns of economic, physical and social
connectivity.
Accessibility maps are made for a specific purpose and they
cannot be used as a generic dataset to represent "the" accessibility
for a given study area. The data described and presented here were
used to create an urban/rural population gradient around large
cities of 50,000 or more people. The assumptions made in the
generation of this accessibility map can be found in the description and data sources links on the left. If these
assumptions sound reasonable for your requirements then the data are
available for download. If, however, the assumptions do
not match your requirements then you can use the information in
these pages as well as the software and external links to create your own
accessibility model.
This map was made for the World Bank's World Development Report
2009Reshaping Economic Geography. The message of
the report can be summarised as: Concentration
& density. 95% of the people live on just 10% of the
land "As economies grow from low to high income,
production becomes more concentrated spatially. Some places—cities,
coastal areas, and connected countries—are favored by producers.
The way to get both the immediate benefits of concentration of
production and the long-term benefits of a convergence in living
standards is economic integration." (WDR 2009, Overview). For
measuring the concentration of economic activity, instead of using
binary distinctions of rural versus urban, the report takes
advantage of global accessibility measures which can be combined
with data on population density to create a much finer typology
which is termed the Agglomeration Index (AI). The global map of
travel time to major cities (cities of 50,000 or more people in year
2000) is a useful dataset in its own right, but it is also a
component of the AI. This is described further in:
Uchida, H. and Nelson, A. (accepted)
Agglomeration Index: Towards a New Measure of Urban Concentration.
In: Guha-Khasnobis, B. (Ed), Development in an Urban World,
UNU-WIDER
Travel time to major cities: A global map of
Accessibility.
The world is shrinking. Cheap flights, large scale commercial
shipping and expanding road networks, only 10% of the land area is remote – more
than 48 hours from a large city.This means that we are
better connected to everywhere else than ever before. But global
travel and international trade and just two of the forces that have
reshaped our world. A new map of Travel Time to Major Cities -
developed by the European Commission and the World Bank - captures
this connectivity and the concentration of economic activity and
also highlights that there is little wilderness left. The map shows
how accessible some parts of the world have become whilst other
regions have remained isolated. Accessibility - whether it is to
markets, schools, hospitals or water - is a precondition for the
satisfaction of almost any economic need. Furthermore, accessibility
is relevant at all levels, from local development to global trade
and this map fills an important gap in our understanding of the
spatial patterns of economic, physical and social
connectivity.
Accessibility maps are made for a specific purpose and they
cannot be used as a generic dataset to represent "the" accessibility
for a given study area. The data described and presented here were
used to create an urban/rural population gradient around large
cities of 50,000 or more people. The assumptions made in the
generation of this accessibility map can be found in the description and data sources links on the left. If these
assumptions sound reasonable for your requirements then the data are
available for download. If, however, the assumptions do
not match your requirements then you can use the information in
these pages as well as the software and external links to create your own
accessibility model.
This map was made for the World Bank's World Development Report
2009Reshaping Economic Geography. The message of
the report can be summarised as: Concentration
& density. 95% of the people live on just 10% of the
land "As economies grow from low to high income,
production becomes more concentrated spatially. Some places—cities,
coastal areas, and connected countries—are favored by producers.
The way to get both the immediate benefits of concentration of
production and the long-term benefits of a convergence in living
standards is economic integration." (WDR 2009, Overview). For
measuring the concentration of economic activity, instead of using
binary distinctions of rural versus urban, the report takes
advantage of global accessibility measures which can be combined
with data on population density to create a much finer typology
which is termed the Agglomeration Index (AI). The global map of
travel time to major cities (cities of 50,000 or more people in year
2000) is a useful dataset in its own right, but it is also a
component of the AI. This is described further in:
Uchida, H. and Nelson, A. (accepted)
Agglomeration Index: Towards a New Measure of Urban Concentration.
In: Guha-Khasnobis, B. (Ed), Development in an Urban World,
UNU-WIDER