I require a table of areas of the US, Canada, and parts of the world
where it is logical and possible to breakdown regions or cities into
smaller areas. I would prefer the areas to be about 100,000
populations, but realize how inconsistent this is between areas of
small populations, or numerous small communities and large population
centers. For example, based on
http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t3/tab01.xls
I end up with numerous towns in the 10,000 range and I don't have Cook
County smaller than 5,376,741.

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Request for Question Clarification by ragingacademic-ga on 09 Dec 2002 17:53 PST

jsumpton - 

Can you clarify what exactly you are expecting as a deliverable?
The entire population of the world divided into 100k population segments...or...?

Thanks,
ragingacademic

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Clarification of Question by jsumpton-ga on 09 Dec 2002 18:10 PST

Something like that, but I can be flexible. I have a website project
where users will select their local area from a table as a means to
filter out data that is pertinent to them. On a given topic, their
interests may be global, like movie or music releases, regional like
weekend activities, or local, like amateur sports, local services or
dining. I realize that this is hugely different between small
communities and the major cities, but I would like a good starting
table.

Hello jsumpton-ga!

Thank you for your question. I have successfully helped to solve a
similar problem before, you are welcome to have a look at it here :

https://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=67684

The data you are looking for can be found at this site :

World Gazetteer : population figures for cities, towns and places 
http://www.gazetteer.de/ 
 
"This site provides statistics about current population of countries,
their administrative divisions, cities and towns as well as images of
the current national flags."

I downloaded the file TSV (tab-separated values) file to be found at
http://www.gazetteer.de/st/cities.zip and have removed irrelevant
fields (columns), and filtered for geographical place names with
populations of 100,000 and greater. There are 3850 records (out of
7196 total).

I have provided this file (1MB) for your download at :

http://www.jobsvolution.ca/cities_jsumpton-ga.xls

This file is in Excel spreadsheet format, and can be exported in TSV
format to be imported into a database. You can and should "normalize"
the data so that countries and states are represented by codes, which
are referenced to records in their respective tables.

Here is an explanation of the columns (fields) in the file :

place name - most atomic unit (town, city), in HTML-friendly format	
basic place name - same as above, in regular text (ASCII) format
administrative division - state/province, in HTML-friendly format 	
basic administrative division - same as above, in regular text (ASCII)
format
country - self explanatory	
admin.center of country/region/both/none - this describes the place
name
current population - self explanatory


I hope this is the answer you are looking for. If you have any
questions or need further information, please do not hesitate to ask.
Thank you for using Google Answers and I wish you all the best on your
project!


Best regards,

kyrie26-ga