Projected Urban Areas and Building Volumes for Global Cities under Shared the Socioeconomic Pathways (2025–2050)

This dataset includes city-scale projections of urban areas and building volumes for 36,829 cities across 138 countries from 2025 to 2050 at 5-year intervals, with 2020 as the base year, under the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The projection results and the accompanying code are provided separately in the file “Projected Urban Areas and Building Volumes for Global Cities under Shared the Socioeconomic Pathways (2025–2050).xlsx” and the folder “code”, respectively. The result file contains two worksheets: “national-scale projections” and “city-scale projections”. The columns ISO_A3, NAM_0, NAM_1, NAM_2, and ADM2CD_c are derived from the Global Administrative Divisions dataset of World Bank. Columns named “SSPx_AREAyyyy” and “SSPx_VOLyyyy” denote the projected urban area (m²) and projected building volume (m³) for year yyyy under the SSPx scenario, respectively. This is the first global dataset projecting both horizontal and vertical urban expansions at the city scale, which provides necessary foundations for analysing and selecting future urban development pathways, and for subsequent studies on the ecological impacts of urban expansion.