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A creek, a dense settlement, a road, and apartment blocks beyond, in Mumbai from the air
Unequal World · Data Story

The Width of a Road

Mumbai, India
The Width of a Road
Loading the environmental burden grid
Environmental Burden
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100 m cells. 37 to 52 per cent of it is a wealth layer on 2.31 km tiles.

Surfaces. Population and built-up surface: GHS-POP R2023A and GHS-BUILT-S R2023A, European Commission Joint Research Centre (Pesaresi et al. 2024). Greenness and nitrogen dioxide: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (Sentinel-2, Sentinel-5P). Night lights: VIIRS nighttime lights, produced by the Earth Observation Group, Payne Institute for Public Policy, Colorado School of Mines, from NOAA/NASA Suomi-NPP VIIRS data. Relative wealth: the Meta Relative Wealth Index (Chi, Fang, Chatterjee and Blumenstock 2022), licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.

Similarity figure. The AlphaEarth Foundations Satellite Embedding dataset is produced by Google and Google DeepMind, licensed CC BY 4.0 (Brown et al. 2025). Scoring and the figures quoted from it: Unequal World, 9 September 2026, with no ground-truth validation against surveyed settlement boundaries.

Everything else. Slum statistics: Census of India 2011, Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner. Dharavi, its redevelopment and the ward human development measure: Government of Maharashtra and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. Dharavi outline: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Photographs: Johnny Miller / Unequal Scenes.