Built-up surface

What

The plate sums GHS-BUILT-S R2023A built-up surface for the 2020 epoch, the latest epoch in that release built from satellite observations. Square metres from the 30 arc-second grid are added inside each 0.02° cell and divided by the area of that cell. The colour is that percent, on a log scale from 0.1 to about 24. Cells under 0.1 percent stay the base land colour. The top of the bar is the 99.5th percentile of cells that have any built-up surface.

Why on this shelf

Built-up surface is the ground covered by buildings. It is not the number of people and not the lights seen at night.

How to read it

Yellow to deep red is a larger share of the cell. The number on the bar is percent of the 0.02° cell. A cell can pass 0.1 percent with a dense district or with a thinner scatter of buildings.

Caveats

The value is built-up surface divided by the area of the cell, not floor space stacked in towers and not a legal city boundary. Ocean and lakes are not coloured. Aside: the 2025 and 2030 epochs in the same release are model projections, and they are not this map.

Sources

• European Commission JRC: GHSL GHS-BUILT-S R2023A, 2020 epoch
• European Commission JRC: Global Human Settlement Layer
• European Commission JRC: GHSL datasets

License

European Commission Joint Research Centre, GHSL GHS-BUILT-S R2023A, 2020 epoch, CC BY 4.0. Aggregated to a 0.02° grid. Boundaries: Natural Earth.

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