I love the work that LSE Cities (London School of Economics) is doing with Urban Age. If you haven’t yet checked out their site, you should do that now. If you’re a city geek, it’s the kind of site you can get lost in for hours. Especially if you’re a sucker for great diagrams like I am.

Here’s one I found today that shows where cities are growing in the world:

Each circle represents a city (well, metropolitan area). The dark green dot is the city’s population in 1950. The lighter green dot is the city’s population in 1990. And the yellow dot is the city’s projected population by 2025. Click here for a larger version of the map.

What’s fascinating about this diagram is that you can so clearly see how the most significant population growth has shifted away from the West to the rest of the world and in particular Asia. That is, those dots have more yellow than green.

We, of course, already knew this was happening. And population is just one dimension. But it’s still interesting to see this in diagram form. We are living through the rise of the East. And this diagram is a reminder of that.

There’s a fairly real divide between east and west here in Toronto. When people talk about real estate or describe the kind of person they are, they often say things like: “I’m an east end kind of person” or “I only want to buy on the west side.” There’s such a split that somebody recently said in a meeting I was in that the east vs. west real estate divide is like Christianity vs. Judaism. 

Historically, the west has generally been considered more desirable than the east–regardless of what scale you’re looking at. Downtown west vs. downtown east, Etobicoke vs. Scarborough, and so on. And for whatever reason, this seems to be the case in a lot cities I’ve been to. Consider Montreal, Vancouver, New York, and London, to name a few. 

But lately, I’ve been noticing a growing acceptance of the east side. Friends are telling me that, even though they don’t know the east all that well, they’re almost agnostic to which side they buy a home on.

At the same time, we’re seeing Toronto’s development boom spread to the east along streets like Church and Jarvis; paralleling the kind of intensification we’ve already seen on the west along Bay Street, University Avenue and further. I’m also noticing a lot of west end restauranteurs open up on the east side. See Carbon Bar and Gusto 501 as two recent examples.

But with the neighborhoods like the Distillery District and Leslieville attracting lots of yuppies and with neighborhoods like Regent Park and the West Don Lands coming online, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise to you that developers and other entrepreneurs are looking east. Maybe you should too.