3.6 Urbanization See Table 3.6 here

Commentary
About the data
Definitions
Data sources

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Urbanization is a companion and stimulus of development, and in developing countries more than half of GDP originates in cities. As the process has accelerated, however, cities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America have also confronted congestion and pollution, with concentrated poverty and uncontrolled sprawl, and problems that at the least impede productive growth and at the worst stifle it.

The rapid growth of cities in developing countries is nearly universal. Whereas less than 22 percent of the developing world’s population was urban in 1960, the proportion averaged 34 percent in 1990. By 2015 it is expected to exceed 50 percent, with the number of city residents due to reach 4 billion, more than twice today’s total. By then there will be 225 urban agglomerations with populations of more than 2 million people, and 26 agglomerations with populations exceeding 10 million (table 3.6a).

Source: United Nations 1995.

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Because the estimates here are based on different national definitions of what constitutes a city or metropolitan area and what is urban, cross-country comparisons should be made with caution. To arrive at estimates of urban population, the United Nations ratio of urban to total population is applied to the World Bank’s estimates of total population (see table 2.1). The resulting series of urban population estimates are also used to compute the population in the largest city as a percentage of the urban population.

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• Urban population is the midyear population of areas defined as urban in each country. The definition varies slightly from country to country.

• Population in urban agglomerations of one million or more is the percentage of a country’s population living in metropolitan areas that in 1990 had a population of one million or more people.

• Population in the largest city is the percentage of a country’s urban population living in that country’s largest metropolitan area.

• Access to sanitation in urban areas is the urban population served by connections to public sewers or household systems such as pit privies, pour-flush latrines, septic tanks, communal toilets, and other such facilities.

Data on urban population, population in urban agglomerations, and population in the largest city come from the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects: The 1994 Revision. Total population figures are World Bank estimates. Data on access to sanitation in urban areas are from the World Health Organization.

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