Help me find a pseudo-cartogram of the world's largest cities.

September 28, 2008 10:58 PM

Help me re-find a cartogram-like picture of the 100 largest cities by population.

A few months ago I saw a chart of the world's largest cities (maybe the cutoff was all cities with over 1 million people, maybe it was the 100 largest). The picture was a large rectangle and the cities were rectangles as well. Tokyo was in the upper-left with a bajillion people (35 million ish), then the next 5 or so cities had in the 20 millions.

There may have been color coding to indicate what country of the world they were in.

I might have seen a story about this chart on Lifehacker, the Freakonomics blog, or maybe just reddit. Can't remember, and I'm apparently not Googling for the right keywords.

posted by brownbat to society & culture (6 answers total)

Was it either this or this?
posted by suedehead at 11:40 PM on September 28, 2008

Not quite. It looked something like this:


posted by brownbat at 5:35 AM on September 29, 2008

I think you are looking for a "Treemap". (more)

Many eyes has quite a couple of these, and tools to customize your own.

Thanks for the question btw, I had not discovered these instant visualization tools before.
posted by dnial at 8:24 AM on September 29, 2008

It was definitely a treemap, thanks.

If you're into visualization tools, you might be interested in the Ted Talk by Hans Rosling (it's an amazing video regardless), and his site "Gapminder," which supports data mashups in a similar way.
posted by brownbat at 10:42 AM on September 29, 2008

It was clearly by Urban Area Population, rather than City Population.
posted by brownbat at 10:50 AM on September 29, 2008

This is very similar, but there were many more cities.

There may be so many treemaps of cities out there that searching for a specific one I stumbled upon a few weeks back is a bit of a lost cause.
posted by brownbat at 11:26 AM on September 29, 2008