Although there are many towns that emerged years before Johannesburg was officially set up in the late 1880s, the gold rush saw the city experiencing one of the biggest population booms in history.

To give you a picture of what this humongous growth looked like (and help city planners prepare for further expansion in numbers) researchers the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the NYU Stern Urbanization Project created a series of videos depicting the century-long population growth of the biggest cities in the world, using data compiled for The Atlas of Urban Expansion project.

Data on a total of 120 cities was collected and individual maps were created for each one.

“The global empirical evidence presented here is critical for an intelligent discussion of plans and policies to manage urban expansion everywhere,” reads the project’s page.

You can watch the Johannesburg video below:

[Source – FastCoExist, Image – Shutterstock]