In 2025 the United Nations redrew every city and town on Earth with one rule. To that rule, Peoria is a town, not a city. Every place in Illinois is drawn the same way, and every one of them has twins somewhere on the planet, built like it.
ScrollAn urban cluster is the methodology's basic unit: one-kilometre squares with at least 300 people each, touching on a side or a corner, 5,000 people or more in all. of them touch Illinois: contain an urban centre, which makes them cities, and do not, which makes them towns. cross a state line, because the grid does not know where Illinois ends.
Pick one. Peoria is open now.
Magenta is a city, cyan a town. Click any shape. Exact terms are in the method note at the bottom.
The rule starts from a grid of one-kilometre squares laid over the whole planet, each with an estimate of how many people live in it. City limits, county lines and zip codes play no part. Hover a square to read it.
The grid is drawn in an equal-area projection, so it sits at a slight tilt against the street grid.
Every urban cluster on Earth comes out of the same grid, so every one of them can be compared to on the same terms: how many people, how tightly packed, how much land is built over per resident, and how many separate dense clusters it holds. All shapes below are drawn at the same scale.
The nearest five in each pool. Lines run from to each of its twins.
A one-page PDF for with all five lists, and a spreadsheet of the comparables for every urban cluster touching Illinois. If your work reports by city limits, zip codes or counties, this is the quickest way to see what a different line would change.