Norpil has made available their layer of Large Urban Areas for downloading.  Tabular data from the United Nation’s World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision Population Database was joined to the 2008 cities dataset that comes with ESRI’s Data & Maps sample data and other sources of data.

The database is available for unrestricted download, under the Creative Commons 2.5 attribution license. This gives you the right to reuse and modify the data, as long as Nordpil and the UN Population Division are properly credited.

The data is available in Shapefile and KMZ formats as well as in tabular format.  Presentations of the data are also available including an animation of maps spanning the years 1950 to 2050 and a map of large urban areas in 2005.

Large cities in 2005 by Norpil