Urban World App Examined

Came upon the visually impressive Urban World App by McKinsey.   Free and readily downloadable for IOS or Android. The front end interface is a globe you can move around and zoom into.   You can access a large economic database by city, population segment,  study year, and region/city locations.  You can also compare regions in 2010 or 2025.   Another interface lets you look at GDP and economic center of gravity as it changed from early history to 2025.  Easy to use and impressive on a tablet.

I liked the design.  Attractive.  Comparisions can be done readily between locations.  The use of the pie chart format made it difficult to do segment comparisons.  Though it would not have looked as sexy, a set of simple bar charts would have been clearer.  You can share any displays you create, which I did on Twitter.  I have not explored it, but I assume the data is downloadable to other visualization engines?  Perhaps not, it is described as proprietary.

Well worth taking a look at.  Free, and you can be exploring in a few minutes.  Hope they continue creating other data examination tools based on this one.  A standard of visual interaction would be useful for enterprise economists.  They write:

" ... The growth of cities in emerging markets is driving the most significant economic transformation in history. The McKinsey Global Institute’s first ever app, Urban World, offers a sense of how economic power will move as this urban expansion takes place. Now available for iPad, iPhone, and Android, the app offers previously unavailable data from a proprietary MGI database of more than 2,600 cities around the world.

The app also places urbanization in a historical context, using a view from space of the global nighttime distribution of light as a proxy for the global distribution of economic activity. Users can visualize the world’s shifting center of economic gravity during the past two millennia, to 2025. The app serves a purpose similar to a 16th-century map—a rough but helpful tool to help navigate the evolving urban world. ... "