Over time, cities expand their physical footprint on land and new cities emerge. The shape of the built environment can affect several domains which are policy relevant, such as carbon emissions, housing affordability, infrastructure costs, and access to services. This study lays a...

This paper assesses differences in life satisfaction along the urban-rural continuum in 111 countries across all world regions. It combines survey data with a consistent definition of settlements to maximise international comparability. Globally, once controlled for individual characteristics,...

The quality of Internet connections is increasingly important for people’s daily lives as work and access to services move to the digital sphere. Likewise, businesses and public agencies need to rely more and more on the digital networks for service delivery. However, the way individuals...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant shift in the way people work, with an increasing number of individuals opting to work from home. Fewer commutes allow people to live further away from the city centre, where jobs typically concentrate. Against this background, this paper tests the...

The rise of remote working in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic may have reshaped people's preferences on residential locations, thus generating a new geography of housing demand. So far, the literature has mainly focused on what has become known as the "doughnut effect", the hollowing out...

The paper introduces a novel, granular house-price dataset sourced from a network of public and private data providers. It offers the first results of investigations into changes in the urban geography of housing markets following the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid rise of working from home...

This paper supports countries in understanding the potential impact of climate-related natural hazards by assessing the exposure of people and assets to these hazards. It develops indicators of climate-related hazards and exposures for seven hazard types (extreme temperature, extreme...

This work leverages globally consistent data on parks from Google Maps, in combination with the computational power of Google Maps Directions API to quantify accessibility to parks across nearly 500 metropolitan areas in six countries: Estonia, France, Greece, Mexico, Sweden, and the United...

This paper analyses the uneven geography of the COVID-19 health impact in OECD and European countries. It first describes the increase in all-cause mortality – i.e. excess mortality – across subnational regions between January and December 2020. Subsequently, it investigates the regional...