Night-time lights across Argentina's census radios

This interactive dashboard presents night-time radiance data for 66,515 census radios alongside GitHub developer activity aggregated at the departamento level for 512 administrative units across Argentina, spanning the period 2014–2025. The visualisation combines satellite-derived luminosity — a widely used proxy for economic activity and urbanisation — with georeferenced records of open-source software development, thereby enabling a joint reading of territorial economic density and the spatial distribution of the digital knowledge economy. Darker orange tones correspond to higher median radiance values within each census radio, whilst blue bubbles indicate the volume of public repositories created by developers geolocated to each departamento. Open fullscreen

Key findings Link to heading

  • Metropolitan concentration of radiance remains pronounced throughout the series. The Buenos Aires metropolitan area (AMBA), together with the corridors linking Rosario, Córdoba, and Mendoza, accounts for the vast majority of high-radiance census radios; this pattern appears largely stable between 2014 and 2025, suggesting that Argentina’s spatial distribution of economic activity — as captured by night-time luminosity — has not undergone substantial deconcentration over the past decade.

  • GitHub developer activity is even more spatially concentrated than radiance. Whilst night-time lights exhibit a gradient that extends into intermediate cities and periurban areas, repository creation and developer counts are overwhelmingly concentrated in the City of Buenos Aires and a handful of secondary metropolitan centres — a pattern consistent with the well-documented agglomeration of knowledge-intensive services in capital cities across Latin America.

  • Northern provinces exhibit persistently low radiance at the census-radio level. Departamentos in Formosa, Chaco, Santiago del Estero, and parts of Misiones display radiance values that remain near the lower bound of the distribution across the entire 2014–2025 window, indicating that satellite-observable economic activity in these territories has not converged toward the national median.

  • A post-2018 deceleration in radiance growth is visible in several intermediate cities. Municipalities that had exhibited rising luminosity between 2014 and 2018 — particularly in the Patagonian energy corridor and parts of the Pampean region — appear to show a flattening or slight decline in median radiance after 2018, a trend that is consistent with the macroeconomic contraction experienced by Argentina during that period.

  • The overlap between high radiance and high GitHub activity is imperfect. Several departamentos with elevated night-time luminosity — especially those associated with extractive industries or agro-export logistics — display relatively low developer counts, suggesting that the relationship between economic density and digital knowledge-economy participation is mediated by sectoral composition rather than determined solely by aggregate output.

Data and method Link to heading

Night-time radiance values are derived from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Day/Night Band (VIIRS DNB), a sensor aboard the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellites that captures low-light emissions from the Earth’s surface at a native resolution of approximately 750 metres. Annual composite images produced by the Earth Observation Group and distributed through Google Earth Engine (GEE) were used to extract median radiance for each of the 66,515 census radios (radios censales) defined by Argentina’s national statistics institute, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC), in the 2010 census geography. The census radio constitutes the smallest publicly available enumeration unit in the Argentine statistical system, thereby affording a high level of spatial granularity for the analysis of intra-urban and rural-urban luminosity gradients.

GitHub developer activity data are sourced from GH Archive, a project that records every public event on the GitHub platform. Repository creation events and unique developer counts were aggregated at the departamento level — the second-level administrative division in Argentina — using geocoded user profiles for the period 2014–2025. This aggregation reflects the coarser spatial resolution at which developer location information is typically available, given that GitHub profiles report city-level rather than sub-municipal locations.

How to use the dashboard Link to heading

The dashboard offers several interaction mechanisms designed to facilitate exploratory spatial analysis. Hover over any census radio to inspect its radiance time series across the available years; a tooltip displays the annual median radiance value together with the radio’s identification code. Hover over a blue bubble to examine the repository count and unique developer tally for the corresponding departamento. The year slider at the top of the map allows navigation through the temporal dimension of the radiance layer, enabling visual comparison of luminosity patterns across different years. The toggle control permits the GitHub layer to be shown or hidden, so that the radiance choropleth can be examined independently or in conjunction with the developer activity overlay.

Data: Google Earth Engine · GH Archive · INDEC.