1.0 - Edo

Patch Notes. 1.0 (Edo).

(21 September 2025). 23:38GMT. Stable Release.

Citation:
Tacitus, V. and A. Kätzchen. Stadestér 1.0 - A Global Database of 41000+ Cities from 3000BC to the Present. 1.0, Zenodo, 21 Sept. 2025, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17172245.

Patch Notes:

• Added both metro and non-metro adjusted versions for Stadestér
• Added methodological paper
• Archived all figures in Stadestér 1.0
• Finished release methodological paper
• Fixed substrata raster
• Uploaded static mirror versions and rasters to Gdrive and Proton

0.4b - Caracol

Patch Notes. 0.4b (Caracol).

(29 August 2025). 08:01GMT. Stable Release.

• Added non-metro variants for Stadestér-GHSL
• Added R visualisation code for certain sections of Stadestér visualisations not implemented in Colab/Jupyter.
• Added raster post-processing for global, urban, and rural raster series
  • Added GIF animations for raster time-series in stadester_visualisations
• Finished processing stadester_ghsl and unifying them as urban rasters
• Fixed proximity and semantic merging for Stadestér

0.3b - Alexandria Eschate

Patch Notes. 0.3b (Alexandria Eschate).

(15 August 2025). 13:35GMT. Stable Release.

Note. This is a prerelease for Stadestér prior to the write-up of a methodological paper and resultant visualisations.

• Added Buringh and DeVries to early historical urban sources
• Added CLI calls for regenerating Stadestér from base sources: console generateMetroCorrectedBase(), console generateNonMetroCorrectedBase()
• Added code or visualising Stadestér functions
• Annular scaling
• Finished KK10/LUH2 population model for fallback (see Eoscala/Velkscala repository for more detail)
• Fixed metro correction techniques
• Fully processed GHS-POP and GHSL rasters
• Manual outlier corrections for both substrata and Chandler/Modelski cities
• Refactored database merging code

0.2a - Rhapta

Patch Notes. 0.2 Alpha (Rhapta).

(14 June 2025). 08:09GMT. Stable Release.

• Added 11-14k cities from the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) for data post-1975AD, along with processing for their background population rasters (GeoTIFF > 32-bit int RGBA PNG), bringing the total number of historical cities in the dataset to 40.000+.
• Began laying foundations for radial buffering and density calculations to model realistic spread in line with work from Angel, Bairoch, and Clark (see Memorandum On Urban Populations: The Fourth Era (1815AD-1991AD)).
• Corrected for metropolitan and agglomerated populations by subtracting subadministrative census divisions from the overall agglomeration for applicable years. There may be negative populations for intermediate processing purposes (i.e. for gridmapping to correct duplicate subadministrative divisions, i.e. London (agglomeration), Inner London, Battersea).
• Improved Google Maps/OSM geolocator methods.
• Improved reliability of Chandler-Modelski, Reba et al., and processing for Populstat.

0.1a - Substratum

Patch Notes. 0.1 Alpha (Substratum).

(9 May 2025). 14:16GMT. Stable Release.

• Added Chandler, Modelski urban population data with manual fixes.
  • Added Reba et al.'s digitised Chandler/Modelski datasets.
• Added Populstat urban population data for towns and cities.
• Added Wikipedia urban population data in addition to Populstat data.
• Geolocated Populstat/Wikipedia cities.
  • Added Wikipedia links per Populstat city. Note that the scoring system was imperfect, and so the set of all Wikipedia cities has not yet been fetched, although data should have been reliably extracted (magnitudes and sigfigs may differ; please use logarithmic Median Absolute Deviation as applied to Zipfian distributions, or simply use the given Populstat data [in thousands]).

All data are located in the main ./input/ folder for review and use.