Twenty-first-century urbanisation

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The redistribution of the human population into settlements, now measured on a grid rather than by administrative boundary. The UN Population Division's World Urbanization Prospects 2025, released on 18 November 2025, reports that 45 per cent of the world's roughly 8.2 billion people live in cities, 36 per cent in towns and semi-dense areas, and 19 per cent in rural areas. The same release notes that aggregating countries' own national definitions of "urban" gives 58 per cent — well below the 81 per cent that cities and towns together account for under the harmonised method. Both numbers are real; they answer different questions. Forward, the release projects roughly 982 million additional city dwellers between 2025 and 2050, with more than half of that increase in seven countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Bangladesh and Ethiopia. The number of cities of ten million or more has quadrupled since 1975, from 8 to 33, and 19 of the 33 are in Asia. What the series does not measure is whether any of those places work.