http://99percentinvisible.org/article/99-darkness-see-half-worlds-population-lives-1-land/Reading stories about overpopulation, it is easy to imagine we live on a planet that is packed with people from coast to coast on every continent. As these data visualizations illustrate, the reality is quite different. Most humans are concentrated in a relatively small set of densely-packed places. Below: half of the Earth’s population lives in the vast black areas while the other half occupies the yellow.
Developed by Max Galka using data from NASA / SEDAC, this map breaks down populations using small square cells, forming a gridded geography independent of political boundaries.
Like tiny pixels on a huge black-and-yellow screen, the 28 million cells are binary: each yellow cell represents an 3-by-3 mile area of land with a population of 8,000 people or more (or: 900 per square mile). Any other 9-square-mile cell with lower density is shown as black.
The more sparsely-populated black zones span 99% of the Earth’s land, while only 1% are lit up in yellow. The organization of these denser areas, however, varies greatly by region, which becomes apparent when zooming into different continents and countries.
