This research, designed by the World Bank, and supported by the Department for International Development (DFID), aims to highlight the unprecedented transformation of the urban systems in the ECA region in the last decades, and to look at this shifts from the demographic, economic, and spatial prospectives. Cities in ECA database comprises data from 5,549 cities in 15 countries of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, as defined by the World Bank Group, and from the United Kingdom and Germany. Database information for each city is in three dimensions: demographic, spatial, and economic. The starting point to construct the Cities in ECA database was to obtain from each of the countries the list of official cities and these cities' population data. Population data collected for cities falls on or around three years: 1989, 1999, and 2010 (or the latest year available). The official list of "cities" was geo-referenced and overlaid with globally-available spatial data to produce city-level indicators capturing spatial characteristics (e.g., urban footprint) and proxies for economic activity. City-level spatial characteristics, including urban footprints (or extents) for the years 1996, 2000, and 2010 and their temporal evolution, were obtained from the Global Nighttime Lights (NTL) dataset. City-level proxies for economic activity were also estimated based on the NTL dataset. Nighttime Lights (NLS) data is produced by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Optical Line Scanner (OLS) database and maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
