Story · Europe map · about 4 min
Where Europe grew, and where it emptied
Between 1990 and 2020 the map window gained about 180 million people, but not evenly: Ireland grew by 42%, Latvia lost 29% of its people. This tour uses the year slider on the population, built-up and settlement layers to see where.
Almost a billion people, in 1990
In 1990 the population grid puts 862 million people inside this map’s window. Remember it is a rectangle: it takes in Turkey, the Caucasus, the Levant and the North African coast as well as Europe. This tour keeps changing the year, with the slider in the panel.
Thirty years later
By 2020 the same window holds 1,044 million people, 21% more. The grid is a modelled estimate: census counts spread onto 1 km squares and scaled to United Nations totals. The picture hardly changes at this scale; the story is in the countries, one by one.
The west and the north kept growing
Spain gained 8.0 million people, 22%, and France 8.0 million, 15%. The United Kingdom gained 9.7 million, 17%, and Ireland went from 3.4 to 4.8 million, up 42%. The grid counts people; it holds no migration or birth figures to say why.
The east emptied
Latvia lost 29% of its people, Lithuania 25%, Bulgaria 21% and Romania 15%, 3.4 million fewer. Moldova fell 31%, and Ukraine lost 7.5 million, 15%, by 2020, before the war that began in 2022. Drag the slider from 1990 to 2020: changes like these rarely move a square into another colour class, so trust the numbers more than the picture.
The fastest growth was in the south-east
Turkey went from 51.9 to 80.8 million, up 56%. Its gain of 28.8 million is more than the United Kingdom, France and Spain added put together, 25.7 million. The window also holds the Levant, where Syria, Lebanon and Israel each grew by two thirds or more.
Buildings grew faster than people
Building footprint in the window grew from 58,076 to 90,135 square kilometres, up 55%, while the population grew 21%: from 67 to 86 square metres of footprint per person. Some of that is better detection, since the 1990 map comes from Landsat, which sees less than the Sentinel-2 satellites behind the later years.
Cities spread, as well as grew
The squares classed as urban centres, the cores of cities, covered 69,340 square kilometres in 1990 and 93,866 in 2020, up 35%. They outgrew the people they hold, which fits a continent whose homes, roads and shops spread outward faster than its numbers rise. These are modelled grids, and the 2025 and 2030 years in the same release are projections and are not shown here.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- The population of Bulgaria and Latvia fell by a fifth or more. Why can the area covered by buildings still have grown?
- Why does a map of one year hide most of what this story is about, and what does the slider add?
Try it on the map: Switch on the population layer, set 1990, then drag to 2020 over Bulgaria or Latvia. Can you see the loss, or only read it in the numbers?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.