The map could not load. The table below, locality by locality, holds the same data.
19751990200020102020
satellite imagesyears estimated between images
Bucharest, Romania, and the county around it, 1975–2020, from satellite images
Ilfov now has more ground under buildings than Bucharest itself
Ilfov, the county that rings Bucharest, Romania's capital, is more than six times the size of the city, yet in 1990 its buildings covered only 26.4 km², against 47.0 in the city. The 2018 satellite images show 66.0 km² in Ilfov and 57.6 km² in Bucharest. Between the 1992 and 2021 censuses the city lost more than 350,000 residents. Start the clock or find your street: see when the buildings around you went up.
Try:
Ground under buildings within 500 m, 1975–2020. Dots mark the years with satellite images.
The map is cut into squares of about 70 × 90 m. For each one, the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) estimated from satellite images how much of the ground is covered by buildings, every five years. Bucharest's six numbered sectors and Ilfov's 40 towns and communes (Romania's rural municipalities) are outlined. Scroll: the year moves with the page.
Average building height, 2020:under 5 m10 m20 m30 m+
1975
The city and the villages around it
In 1975 buildings covered 39.4 km² of today's Bucharest and 20.9 km² of all of today's Ilfov. The villages around show as thin strings along the roads and rivers.
Blue means buildings that stood by 1990. Each warm colour is a decade after that. The dotted line is Bucharest's boundary.
1975–1990
The city grows inside its boundaries
Between 1975 and 1990 Bucharest added 7.6 km² of buildings and Ilfov 5.5 km². Half of the new ground lay within 7.6 km of Piața Unirii, the square at the city's centre.
The 1975 images miss low houses more easily, so part of this growth may be only what the satellites failed to see then. And the demolitions of the 1980s, such as the clearing of Uranus Hill for Nicolae Ceaușescu's palace, do not show at all. Why.
1990–2000
The first decade in which Ilfov builds more than Bucharest
In the 1990s Ilfov added 8.7 km² of buildings and Bucharest 4.6 km². The square kilometres with the most new building are in Voluntari, Pantelimon, Balotești and Pipera (Voluntari), all just outside the city.
2000–2010
The boom
Between 2000 and 2010 Ilfov added 17.2 km², 4.9 times as much as Bucharest (3.5 km²). The square kilometres with the most new building are in Dragomirești-Vale, Popești (Popești-Leordeni), Independenței (Bragadiru) and Chiajna.
In the square at Dragomirești-Vale, west of the city by the A1 motorway to Pitești, and in the one in northern Sector 1, 71% and 80% of the new built surface is classed as non-residential: halls, warehouses, shops, offices.
2010–2015
Ilfov pulls ahead
In the years the JRC estimates between images, Ilfov pulls ahead between 2010 and 2015: its ground under buildings overtakes Bucharest's. The 2018 images, at 10 m resolution, confirm it: 66.0 km² in Ilfov, 57.6 km² in Bucharest.
2010–2020
The second wave
Between 2010 and 2020 Ilfov added another 16.2 km². Half of the new ground now lies more than 12.5 km from Piața Unirii. The square kilometres with the most new building are in Dragomirești-Vale, Militari Residence (Chiajna), Independenței (Bragadiru) and Crețuleasca (Ștefăneștii de Jos).
In the squares at Militari Residence, a large new housing estate on the western edge, and in Bragadiru, under 10% of the new built surface is classed as non-residential. In those at Dragomirești-Vale, by the A1, and at Crețuleasca, by the A3 motorway north-east of the city, 80% and 71% is.
2020
Bucharest is tall, Ilfov is spread out
The same map, coloured by height. Buildings in Bucharest average 12.6 m, in Ilfov 5.3 m. Bucharest's built volume is still twice Ilfov's.
Even by volume, though, Ilfov has added more since 1990: 218 million m³, against 101 million in Bucharest.
Between 1975 and 1990, half of the newly built ground lay within 7.6 km of Piața Unirii. In the 1990s that mark had moved to 10.7 km, and in the 2010s to 12.5 km.
Ground covered by new buildings in each 2-km ring around Piața Unirii, km². The triangles on the axis mark the distance within which half of the new ground lies. Bucharest ends, on average, about 8–10 km from the centre.The values, as a table
The censuses counted 2,354,510 people in Bucharest and Ilfov together in 1992 and 2,259,665 in 2021: 4% fewer, although the counting changed in 2011 (see the note under the chart). The ground under buildings grew by 72% between 1990 and 2020.
Ground under buildings, km². Dots mark the Landsat image years, the diamond the 2018 Sentinel-2 image at 10 m.Census population
The 1992 and 2002 censuses also counted people temporarily abroad; from 2011 only those who usually live here are counted. Part of the drop between 2002 and 2011 comes from that change. Ilfov is counted within today's boundaries.
Between the two censuses Bucharest has 350,584 fewer residents and Ilfov 255,739 more. The figures do not show how much of the drop comes from moves to Ilfov, how much from emigration, how much from more deaths than births and how much from the change in how the population is counted.
Dividing the 1990 buildings by the 1992 residents, Bucharest had about 23 m² of ground under buildings per resident; the 2020 buildings over the 2021 residents give about 34 m². Ilfov had 92 m², then 126 m². That is the footprint of every building, factories, warehouses and shops included.
Housing statistics point the same way, independently of the satellites. Romania's National Institute of Statistics counted 88,350 dwellings in Ilfov at the end of 1992 and 201,443 at the end of 2020, 2.3 times as many. In Bucharest the increase was 16%.
In all 40 of Ilfov's towns and communes the ground under buildings has grown since 1990, and in 35 of them it has at least doubled. Voluntari gained the most new ground; Corbeanca grew fastest in relative terms. Among the sectors, Sector 1 grew most.
The JRC method starts from the newest images and works back in time, removing buildings only where older images show bare ground. A building pulled down and replaced by another leaves no trace. On the site of the Palace of the Parliament, the vast building Ceaușescu put up there, the map shows built ground in every year, although the Uranus quarter was demolished in the 1980s. A place built up in 1975 and left empty later would wrongly show as empty in 1975 too. The hill's story is in Uranus in 3D.
The years between images
Only five years rest on satellite images: 1975, 1990, 2000, 2014 and 2018. The JRC estimates the others in between; on the map's clock, the image years are marked with solid dots. The year 2020 is also estimated by the JRC, from the 2018 images; that is why the firm comparison is the 2018 one.
The villages of 1975
The 1975 images have pixels of about 60 m. Small village houses are harder to see than tower blocks, so Ilfov's built ground in 1975 is probably underestimated. That is why growth is compared from 1990 on, when the pixels are 30 m.
Homes or warehouses
The split into residential and non-residential buildings is also an estimate from the images. By it, 14% of the ground built in Ilfov since 1990 is non-residential. Counting only the surface classed as residential, Ilfov still has more ground under buildings than Bucharest: 58.7 km² against 46.3 km² in 2020.
Built is not lived in
A finished, empty house looks the same from orbit as a full one. How much of the housing stock stands empty is in Casa goală (Romanian).
Building data are GHS-BUILT-S R2023A from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC): the built-up surface in each 3-arc-second square (about 66 × 93 m at Bucharest's latitude), every five years, 1975–2020. GHS-BUILT-V (volume, from which average height follows) and the observed 2018 layer at 10 m are also used. The 2025 and 2030 epochs in the same set are projections and are left out.
Sector and commune boundaries are the LAU set from geo-spatial.org (ANCPI, 2025). Each square belongs to the locality its centre falls in. Population comes from the National Institute of Statistics tables for the 1992, 2002, 2011 and 2021 censuses, and dwellings from the LOC101B series (to 2020, before it was revised after the census).
Search uses OpenStreetMap addresses and streets. For an address, the 500 m radius takes every square whose centre lies within 500 m. "Buildings appear" means the first year they cover at least 8% of the square, given as the interval between two satellite images.
Pesaresi, M., Politis, P. (2023): GHS-BUILT-S R2023A – GHS built-up surface grid, derived from Sentinel-2 composite and Landsat, multitemporal (1975–2030). European Commission, JRC. doi:10.2905/9F06F36F-4B11-47EC-ABB0-4F8B7B1D72EA