Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility
Concentration & density: 95% of the people live on just 10% of the land
Wilderness? Only 10% of the land area is remote – more than 48 hours from a large city
Why was this map made? This map was made for the World Bank's World Development Report 2009 Reshaping 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.
