The long breadth of cities: revisiting worldwide urbanization patterns, 1950–2030
A comparative analysis of population dynamics worldwide contributes to profile distinctive demographic
and economic trajectories of urban growth, discriminating processes of settlement concentration
or dispersion under sequential cycles of urbanization. However, a wide-ranging
characterization of urban cycles based on demographic dynamics worldwide is still missing. The
present work is aimed at filling such a gap analysing long-term changes (1950–2030) in annual
population growth rate of 1691 urban agglomerations with more than 300,000 inhabitants in 74