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Apr 3, 2023 · Today, over 4 billion people around the world – more than half the global population – live in cities. This trend is expected to continue. By 2050, with the urban population more than doubling its current size, nearly 7 of 10 people in the world will live in cities.
- Urbanization Across The World Today
- How Urban Is The World?
- Urban Slum Populations
- Long-Run History of Urbanization
- How Do Living Standards Change as People Move to Urban areas?
- Definitions and Measurement
Share of population living in urban areas
How does the share of people living in urban areas vary between countries? In the chart shown below, we see the share of the population that is urbanized across the world. Across most high-income countries – across Western Europe, the Americas, Australia, Japan, and the Middle East – more than 80% of the population lives in urban areas. Across most upper-middle-income countries – in Eastern Europe, East Asia, North and Southern Africa, and South America – between 50% to 80% of people do. In m...
What we know about urban populations and why it matters
Before looking in more detail at the differences in estimates of urban populations, we should first clarify what we do know: 1. Globally more people live in urbanized settings than not (disputes in these figures are all above the 50% urban mark); 2. The broad distribution and density of where people live across the world (sometimes at very high resolution); 3. Although it can seem like our expanding cities take up a lot of land, only a bit more than 1% of global land is defined as built-up ar...
UN estimates: More than half of the world’s population live in urban areas
At first glance, this seems like a simple question to answer. Figures reported by the United Nations (UN) deliver a straightforward answer.3 In the chart here we see the share of the world's population living in urban and rural areas, extending from 1960.4This is based on nationally-collated census figures, combined with UN estimates where census data is unavailable. As of 1960, the rural segment constituted more than 60% of the population. By the year 2007, the distribution between urban and...
How is an urban area defined?
'What defines an urban area?' lies at the center of these debates. There is currently no universal definition of what 'urban' means. The UN reports figures based on nationally defined urban shares. The problem, however, is that countries adopt very different definitions of urbanization. Not only do the thresholds of urban versus rural vary, but the typesof metrics used also differ. Some countries use minimum population thresholds, others use population density, infrastructure development, emp...
Number of people living in urban slums
This map shows the total number of people living in urban slum households in each country.
Urbanization over the past 12,000 years
The recency of urbanization becomes even more pronounced when we look at trends for countries and regions over even longer timescales – the past 10,000 years. This is shown in the visualization here, derived from the work of the History Database of the Global Environment.11 As we see, urban living is a very recent development. For most of our history, humans lived in low-density, rural settings. Prior to 1000, it's estimated that the share of the world population living in urban settings did...
Populations urbanize as they get richer
In the chart, we show the relationship between the share of the population living in urban areas on the y-axis, and average income (gross domestic product per capita) on the x-axis. Here we see a strong relationship between urbanization and income: as countries get richer, they tend to become more urbanized. The link between urbanization and economic growth has been well documented.12 Urbanization is complex, however: there are many recognized benefits of urban settings (when developed succes...
Urban populations tend to have higher living standards
There are many examples — across broad areas of development — that suggest that, on average, living standards are higher in urban populations than in rural ones. Some examples include: 1. in nearly all countries electricity access is higher in urbanareas than in rural areas; 2. access to improved sanitation is higherin urban areas; 3. access to improved drinking water is higherin urban areas; 4. access to clean fuels for cooking and heating is higherin urban areas; 5. child malnutrition is lo...
Agricultural employment falls with urbanization
It would be expected that changing where populations live will have an impact on types of employment. Rural-urban migration has been empirically linked with the structural transformation process: as urban population shares increase, employment tends to shift from agriculture towards industry/manufacturing, or services.15 In the chart, we see the share of people employed who are in agriculture (y-axis) versus the share of the population living in urban areas (x-axis). Here, in general, we see...
How is an urban population defined?
There is no universal definition of what constitutes an 'urban area'. Definitions of an urban settlement vary widely across countries, both in terms of the metrics used to define them, and their threshold level. The UN World Urbanization Prospects (2018) database provides a downloadable list of underlying data sources and the statistical concepts used to define 'urban' by country.5 In the chart, we have mapped the minimum threshold level of the number of inhabitants in a settlement needed for...
How is a slum household defined?
UN-HABITAT defines a slum household as a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area who lack one or more of the following16: 1. Durable housing of a permanent nature that protects against extreme climate conditions. 2. Sufficient living space which means no more than three people sharing the same room. 3. Easy access to safe water in sufficient amounts at an affordable price. 4. 4. Access to adequate sanitation in the form of a private or public toilet shared by a reason...
How is urban density defined?
The density of a geographic area is measured on the basis of the average number of people per unit of area (for example, the number of people per square kilometer, km2). It's therefore calculated as the population divided by the land area for that given population. But what does urbandensity mean? Here, again, we encounter difficulty in agreeing on the standard boundary definition of what constitutes an urban area. The standard metric adopted (and encouraged) by the UN for urban density is th...
Nov 4, 2020 · Urban populations made up the highest share in Northern American countries – 83.6 percent of residents lived in cities in 2020. Overall, more people in the world live in urban than in rural setting since 2010. In 2020, 56.2 percent of the world population was urban. Half of these people lived in towns of less than 500,000 inhabitants.
May 16, 2018 · Population decline in some cities and in rural areas ... many of them located in Asia and Africa. While one in eight people live in 33 megacities worldwide, close to half of the world’s urban ...
United Kingdom has 1 cities with more than a million people, 95 cities with between 100,000 and 1 million people, and 951 cities with between 10,000 and 100,000 people. The largest city in United Kingdom is London, with a population of 7,556,900 people.
Around 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities by 2050, projects new UN report. By 2050, two out of every three people are likely to be living in cities or other urban centres, ...
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Apr 5, 2024 · One of the big demographic trends in recent decades has been the shift from rural places to cities. Until 2020, most people in the world lived in smaller urban settings like towns and suburbs, with populations between 5,000 and 50,000. Since then, cities with more than 50,000 people have become the most popular living areas worldwide, as shown ...
