A new story of the Atlas of Demography illustrates the links between urbanisation and demographic trajectories: the proportion of people living in cities continues to grow in world regions and countries with high fertility rates, while urbanisation has slowed down in countries with low birth rates.

Over the past seven decades, the world population has grown exponentially, and the share of the population living in cities has increased rapidly.

In 1950 most people lived in rural areas, but a faster growing city population meant that by 1965 the global population was equally distributed across rural and urban areas, and in 2020, almost half of the global population lived in cities.

The global population growth has started to slow down, and is projected to continue to do so over the coming decades. 

The share of population in cities will continue to increase, reaching 58% of the global population in 2070. 

However, the urbanisation rates are very different in countries experiencing rapid population expansion, with respect to those faced with population decline.

A new Atlas of Demography story illustrates how countries’ demographic trends are mirrored in their urbanisation trends.

It shows that the pace of urbanisation remains faster in developing countries, where the fertility rates are high and the population is still growing rapidly. 

In more developed regions, which have transitioned from a stage of population growth to a stage of stagnant or declining population, the share of people living in urban areas is growing slower and this at the expense of the declining rural population.

In the European Union the share of city residents is expected to reach 43% by 2070.
Like other countries in advanced stages of demographic transition (low birth rates and declining population), many EU Member States are confronted with an ageing population, in particular in rural areas.

This story relies on the new, harmonised and global definition of urbanisation, which was endorsed by the UN in 2020 to facilitate comparability of trends across various regions of the world.

The analysis behind this story also contributed to a chapter of the UN Habitant World Cities Report 2022 (Chapter 2 - Scenarios of Urban Futures) launched during the World Urban Forum in Katowice in June 2022.

Read more: Atlas of Demography story