Cities

Who lives where

Neighbourhood dot maps of origin for 9 cities: 19.5 million residents drawn as 2.2 million dots, each placed at random inside the small area it was counted in and coloured by origin group. Every count is the city's or country's official figure for that area — nothing is modelled or interpolated. Pick a city to see which neighbourhoods its communities call home.

Countries measure origin differently — by country of birth, by nationality, or by migration background — and each map says which one it uses. Looking for six thousand years of urban growth instead? That is now the city history map.

Pick a city

Not mapped

  • Paris · FranceNo neighbourhood data published

    INSEE publishes only the total number of immigrants and foreigners per IRIS — no country or region of birth.

  • Vienna · AustriaNo neighbourhood data published

    Statistics Vienna splits its Zählbezirke (counting districts) only into Austria-born and foreign-born; origin groups exist for the 23 districts only.

  • Madrid · SpainNo neighbourhood data published

    The municipal register splits census sections only into Spanish and foreign nationality.

  • Oslo · NorwayData exists · not built yet

    Oslo's statistics bank has three broad origin groups for 99 sub-districts; the map needs official sub-district boundaries first.

  • New York, Chicago, Los Angeles · United StatesData exists · not built yet

    The Census Bureau's ACS 5-year tables give place of birth by census tract.

  • Toronto · CanadaData exists · not built yet

    Statistics Canada's 2021 Census profile gives immigrants' place of birth by dissemination area.

  • Sydney, Melbourne · AustraliaData exists · not built yet

    The ABS 2021 Census gives country of birth by SA1 area.

How the maps are made

For each small area — a London output area, a Dutch buurt, a Berlin Planungsraum, a Barcelona census section — the build script takes the published count for each origin group, divides it by the city's people-per-dot ratio (rounding up or down at random, so totals are right on average) and scatters that many dots uniformly inside the area. Dots inside an area are therefore not addresses: their position within it is random, only the area totals are real. Every map also has an Exact areas view that shades each area by its official share, and hovering any area shows its published counts.

The style follows Karim Douïeb's Brussels. A lovely Melting-Pot. Where an office suppresses small cells for confidentiality, those people are left out or shown as “not published”.