Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 814

The Shed in Hudson Yards has an exhibition on right now called Manual Override . It features the work of five artists. One of those artists is Lynn Hershman Leeson, who is known for exploring the relationship between humans and technology (naturally, she lives in the Bay Area). Her piece at the exhibition is called Shadow Stalker .

The way Shadow Stalker works is that you enter your email address -- a single data point. The installation then pulls up all of the publicly accessible information associated with your email address. Things like your name, age, address, phone numbers, where you were last seen, and more.

She refers to this information as your "digital shadow." It is all of the personal information that is publicly accessible because of the internet. And it is the kind of the information that is already used for things like "predictive policing." Software that predicts where crime is likely to occur.

I am fairly public as a result of this blog. Already this year I have written over 75,000 words. So I can only imagine what the internet knows about me. Probably a lot. But of course, I am volunteering a lot of this information. What does the internet know about us that we didn't explicitly tell it?

If you're interested in learning more about Shadow Stalker, here's a video .

Since 2005, LSE Cities (London School of Economics) has been collecting comparative data on how global cities perform in terms of key spatial, socioeconomic, and environmental indicators.

This is their latest data matrix :

To be clear, it is not a ranking of cities. It is intended to help us better understand how different cities around the world are performing.

Depending on how you're consuming this post, the text may be difficult to read. So here's what each column represents, moving from left to right:

• Current population in the administrative city (millions)

• Current population in the urban agglomeration (millions)

• Average hourly population growth of urban agglomeration 2015 to 2030 (people per hour)

• Administrative city area (km2)

• Average density of built-up administrative area (people/km2)

• GDP per capita in urban area ($, PPP)

• Percentage of country's GDP produced by the metro region

• Population under 20 (%)

• Murder rate (homicides per 100,000 inhabitants)

• Percentage of daily trips made by public transport

• Percentage of daily trips made by walking & cycling

• Car ownership rate (per 1,000 inhabitants)

• CO2 emissions (tonnes per capita)

If you'd prefer to download a full PDF of the chart, click here .

According to this recent Bloomberg article , the world is expected to add more than 3 billion people by 2100. At the same time, the global average fertility rate is dropping. In 1960, it was five live births per woman. As of 2017, it had dropped to 2.43.

About half of all countries are now below the rate of replacement, which means they're relying on immigration (places like Canada) and/or they're relying on labor productivity gains to keep their economy growing (places like China).

The article is also fascinating in that it begins to consider the economic and cultural forces that shape the above fertility rates. Women in Saudi Arabia, for example, have one of the lowest labor force participation rates in the world. Only about 25% are in the workforce.

If you'd like to read the full article, you can do that here .

Image: Bloomberg