9/9 The data is open access and you can explore the spatial sphere of influence of 30,000 urban centers with FAO's City-Region Explorer — no GIS skills needed.
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s42...
City-Region Explorer: data.apps.fao.org/cityregions
8/9 This reshapes how you think about policy.
41% of the world's population accesses multiple urban tiers within 1 hour of travel. The peri-urban, the in-between, the multi-layered — that's where most people actually live.
Policies built on "urban vs. rural" miss them.
7/9 This is just how life works in practice. You buy groceries in the closest town. Your kids go to secondary school in a small city a bit further. You catch a flight from an airport in a large city further still.
Different services, different centers, different travel times.
6/9 Multi-Tier City-Region approach: any location can connect to MULTIPLE urban centers at different scales simultaneously.
The difference? Towns and small cities go from serving 34% of the global population (URCA) to 55% (MTCR). They were there all along — just invisible.
5/9 URCA (Urban-Rural Catchment Areas): adds travel time to the nearest urban center. Now location matters.
But each place connects to only ONE center — the biggest nearby. Towns and small cities often vanish from view.
4/9 DEGURBA (Degree of Urbanization): provides a straightforward framework grounded in population density. 7 categories instead of 2.
Better — but every location is still treated as an island. A grid cell ‘knows nothing’ about what surrounds it.
3/9 In a new Perspective in @npjUrbanSustain with Serkan Girgin, we compare three global geospatial approaches that move beyond this dichotomy — each adding a layer of reality the previous one couldn't capture.
2/9 Urban or rural. One bit of information. That's all the traditional classification tells you about any location on Earth.
But a village 30 min from a mid-sized city has almost nothing in common with one 3 hours from the nearest town. The binary erases that entirely.
Is "urban vs. rural" still a useful way to see the world?
In many cases probably not.
A thread on why the most common population classification in development policy can be also one of the most misleading. 🧵
Redirecting $385bn in harmful subsidies could fully fund global regenerative and agroecological transitions.
Discover the solutions and pathways. Read the report: futureoffood.org/publication-library/raft... #agroecology
📢 New @FAO report finds that around 1.7 billion people live in areas where land degradation limits crop yields.
We can avoid, reduce and reverse land degradation with targeted policies and strengthened institutions. 🌱
👉 Interactive Story:
www.fao.org/interactive/...
#SOFA2025 #LandDegradation
🌍✨ New Paper Out!
Learn how to analyze properties of any City-Region in the world with a click of your mouse.
openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/c...
“#Power is often absent from conversations about food systems.”— Olivier De Schutter, @ipes-food.org
These words resonated at our recent Global Convening on #FoodSystemsTransformation.
Explore more powerful quotes ⬇️
📩 Subscribe to hear more from the convening—coming soon: bit.ly/GA_subscribe
Health and place – my journey
www.itg.be/en/health-st...
#GeospatialHealth #GISchat #geosky
Absolutely and totally sick
Thanks!
It is a great tool for PhD students because it helps leverage a novel geospatial dataset. We hope folks will find it helpful.
A week from the launch we have a lot of interest from international financial institutions.
9/ 🎥 Tutorial video: How to get into the City-Region Explorer panel and leverage FAO’s Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform functionalities
youtu.be/g7l9T85yG_0
8/ 🎥 Tutorial video: Aggregated Analytics in the City-Region Explorer
youtu.be/7ZBBTlj7J00
7/ 🎥 Tutorial video: The City-Region Explorer Explained with the City of Toulouse (France)
youtu.be/JGDavYI5j1Q
6/ 🎥 Tutorial video: Navigating the City-Region Explorer
youtu.be/u7b5y6lrrcc
5/ 🎥 Watch the tutorial video:
Welcome to the City-Region Explorer!
youtu.be/nbVvUNLP6s4
4/ The City-Region Explorer is great for researchers and practitioners.
Some tutorials: 4️⃣videos on functionalities of the Explorer panel, and 1️⃣video on its embedding in the FAO's geospatial platform. Check them out below.
@patrickwebb.bsky.social @waiterich.bsky.social @isavagneron.bsky.social
3/The City-Region Explorer can replicate all figures & tables published in our @NatCities paper:
doi.org/10.1038/s442...
Users can go beyond replication and examine countries not highlighted in our paper.
@DavidUbilava.bsky.social @willmasters.bsky.social @robertfinger.bsky.social
2/ The City-Region Explorer 👇https://data.apps.fao.org/cityregions
Examine 30,000 urban centers classified into four tiers—towns, small, intermediate, and large cities—as well as their interconnections and surrounding areas. No geospatial expertise needed.
Example: Toulouse, France.👇
1/ 🚀Big Update❗❗
Last year we published @NatCities, a systematic analysis of how countries are organized around multiple urban centres. That geospatial dataset is very complex. So we just launched the City-Region Explorer🔎... an easy to use platform for analysis. 🧵
#EconSky #Geography #GISChat
Our new paper shows how critical it is to use reliable data to achieve effective targeting and use of development resources: doi.org/10.1038/s414....
Sadly, the source of these data was terminated a few weeks ago. Draw your own conclusions...
Want a cheap & sustainable healthy diet? New preprint confirms that less expensive options generally emit less GHGs. Main exception is animal source foods. The least emitting healthy diets cost ~$7/day and emit 0.7 kg CO2e, while actual choices cost ~$10 and emit 2.4 kg.
arxiv.org/abs/2505.24457
Text from an article: Given the current state of evidence production in the social sciences, I believe that many - perhaps most - attempts to use social scientific evidence to inform policy will not lead to better outcomes. This is not because of politics or the challenges of scaling small programs. The problem is more immediate. Much of social science research is of poor quality, and sorting the trustworthy work from bad work is difficult, costly, and time-consuming.
I think the current state of social science research is pretty bad and I wrote something for @asteriskmag.bsky.social about it. asteriskmag.com/issues/10/ca...
SAVE THE DATE❕❕ June 3rd📅
Link to register: fao.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Link to join: fao.zoom.us/s/9833663912...