General – Worldmapper

Urban Population

Worldmapper — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:43:10 +0000

More than half of the world's population lives in cities today. This proportion is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. According to the UN's World Urbanization Prospects "the urban population of the world has grown rapidly from 746 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2014. Asia, despite its lower level of urbanization, is home to 53 per cent of the world’s urban population, followed by Europe with 14 per cent and Latin America and the Caribbean with 13 per cent. [...] Overall, nearly half of the world’s 3.9 billion urban dwellers reside in relatively small settlements with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, while only around one in eight live in the 28 mega-cities with 10 million inhabitants or more. Many of the fastest growing cities in the world are relatively small urban settlements."

Urban Living

Worldmapper — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 22:48:38 +0000

Territory size shows the proportion of all people living in urban areas, that live in that territory in 2014.

Data sources

This map uses data by United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division published in the World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision (last accessed March 2018). We aim to map as complete data as possible and therefore estimate data for missing values. In some cases, missing data for very small territories is not used in the cartogram and that area is therefore omitted in the map.

Further notes on the data, as well as all modifications to the original data source are noted in our data sheets. Data for this map will soon be available as a download.

Rural Living

Worldmapper — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 22:43:01 +0000

The country with the highest total number of people living in rural areas is India, about the same number as the following countries China, Indonesia and Bangladesh put together. But while India has the highest total number of their population living in a rural environment, with its 67 per cent share of the population, there are 42 countries with a higher share. Within the next five years rural living will have reached its climax. According to the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects (a biennial publication from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs), rural populations will have reached their absolute high in 2022 with approximately 3.38 billion people. This is only slightly up from the current 3.37 billion people, showing how the number of people not living in cities has flatlined since the turn of the century and comes after a period of continuous growth since the 1950s when only 1.78 billion people lived in the countryside. The current long-term projections see this number going slightly down to 3.2 billion people by 2050. While the rural population has become a minority globally (at approximately 46 per cent), the majority of those are increasingly concentrated in the poorer parts of the world. Sixty-nine per cent of people in the least developed countries live in rural areas, while this number is at only 20 per cent in higher-income countries.