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During the last half-century or so, one of the biggest changes in how humans live is the greater share of people around the world who live in cities. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs describes some pattern in its report on World Urbanization Prospects 2025: Summary of Results (November 2025).

The report defines terms in this way: Cities “are areas with a high density (at least
1,500 inhabitants per km²) and a large population (at least 50,000 inhabitants).” Towns “are urban clusters outside of cities with a moderate density (at least 300 inhabitants per km²) and a population of at least 5,000 inhabitants.” Rural areas have density of less than 300 inhabitants per square kilometer. With these definitions in mind:

Close to 500 million people lived in cities in 1950, equivalent to just one fifth of the world’s 2.5 billion total population. The remaining four fifths were evenly split between towns and rural areas (figure 1.1). In the decades that followed, the number of people living in cities and towns grew rapidly, while the rural population increased only slowly. By the mid-1970s, city dwellers outnumbered those in rural areas, but towns remained the most common living environment globally. The balance tipped again some twenty years later, in 1996, when the collective population of cities overtook that of towns. Since then, both the number of city dwellers and their share of the global population have continued to grow. In 2025, 45 per cent of the world’s 8.2 billion people lived in cities, 36 per cent lived in towns, and the remaining 19
per cent lived in rural areas. Most of the future growth of the world’s population will occur in cities. Cities are expected to account for two thirds of the projected growth of the world’s population by 2050, with most of the remaining one third of growth concentrated in towns. The global rural population is expected to peak sometime during the 2040s and then begin to gradually decline.

Around the world, a large share of the growth in city-dwellers over these 75 years has come in Latin America, east, south, and west, Asia, and Northern Africa. But some high-income countries continue to have relatively low densities: “In several major high-income countries, including Germany, Italy and the United States of America, towns remain the predominant settlement type as of 2025. Approximately 40 per cent of the total population of these three countries resides in towns, compared to about one third living in cities. … Notably, rural areas have been the most common place of residence in France over the past half-century, a trend that is projected to continue through 2050. A similar pattern is observed in several countries across Central and Eastern Europe, including Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland and Romania, where rural living remains prevalent.”

The definition of “city” used here is not based on legal boundaries of a city, but on actual population patterns: thus, if a “city” extends beyond its legal boundaries with a high enough population density, it is all counted as a single “city” in these metrics. Here are the 10 highest-population cities around the world in 2000, 2025, and projected for 2050.
 

This report is about counting population, density, and looking at trends and patterns around the world, not in a direct way about policy implications. But the report does take care to note and emphasize that lower-density towns and rural areas play important social, economic, and development roles along with high-density cities.

In addition, cities are always a tradeoff (in economic term) between benefits and disadvantages of agglomeration. Benefits include having expertise, workers, and consumers clustered together in a way that generates productivity and new ideas. However, that same clustering can also create costs of congestion and networks of crime. Environmental and health effects of cities can be dramatically different depending on how they are organized, what infrastructure is built, and how regulations and geography factors shape their growth. For 4 billion people, the day-to-day facts of their standard of living, broadly understood, are powerfully shaped by the realities of the urban area in which they live.

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