Hi guys!
First of all, thanks for this wonderful resource – great work!
Next – I just announced this little database that I assembled from UN Population Division statistics that I georeferenced. If you are interested, we could maybe merge that into the populated places layer as extra attributes?
I am not 100% sure it is good and needed, it is just an idea and an offer. It might be on the outside of the basemap ambition of Natural Earth, and there would also be a problem with the data not being 1:1. There would be places in NE that are not in my database – which only includes urban areas with more than 750000 inhabitants.
More info at:
http://nordpil.com/go/resources/world-database-of-large-cities/
Great idea, Frax! We’ll have a look at adding the historic population numbers as attributes on the NE populated places.
As you note, you have different city selections most notably in China, India, and Africa. We can accommodate this in a variety of ways and will use it to revise our cities there. Likely we’d only take a selection of cities in that area and provide the rest at a different, optional scale rank (like 9 and 10 instead of the current 
as our scale ranks are largely based on ability to label features, not purely population. Thanks!
ok, cool – let me know if I can help out in any way. Maybe the first step would be to maybe have an id so that one can relate the two databases.
PS – my name is Hugo Ahlenius – I thought I would add my name to a signature and use the same username as on CartoTalk, but there doesn’t seem to be any signature here! We met at the NACIS in Madison, I think.
Hey Hugo! I’m almost done integrating new populated places from North America and we can apply some of that same place-matching logic to your historical statistics file. Let’s email off forum to make this happen.
@Hugo: I was able to get 96% (all but 22) to match pretty well. The remainder are in China and India and looks like we’ll need to add new towns in Natural Earth for ~18 of them. Trying to disambiguate the remainder with their dopplegangers. The positional accuracy of the “world-database-of-large-cities” is courser (less accurate) than Natural Earth so we’ll need to research the correct lat-lng to use on add. Do you have time for that? If so, I can send you a SHP file of these. Please email me at nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com.
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