Description of the GHS Urban Centre Database 2015

The Global Human Settlement Layer Urban Centres Database (GHS-UCDB) is the most complete database on cities to date, publicly released as an open and free dataset - GHS STAT UCDB2015MT GLOBE R2019A V1. 0. The database represents the global status on Urban Centres in 2015 by offering cities location, their extent (surface, shape), and describing each city with a set of geographical, socio-economic and environmental attributes, many of them going back 25 or even 40 years in time. Urban Centres are defined in a consistent way across geographical locations and over time, applying the “Global Definition of Cities and Settlements” developed by the European Union to the Global Human Settlement Layer Built-up (GHS-BUILT) areas and Population (GHS-POP) grids. report contains the description of the dimensions and the derived attributes that characterise the Urban Centres in the database. The document includes notes about methodology and sources. The GHS-UCDB contains information for more than 10, 000 Urban Centres and it is the baseline data of the analytical results presented in the Atlas of the Human Planet 2018.