Figure 8.3

Figure 8.3: Population of the world, by area of residence and size class of urban settlement for 2018. As of 2018, 4.2 billion people or 55% of the world population reside in urban settlements while 45% reside in rural areas. The coloured stacked column for the urban population represents the total number of inhabitants for a given size class of urban settlements. Megacities of 10 million or more inhabitants have a total of only 529 million inhabitants, corresponding to 12.5% of the urban population. In contrast, about 1.8 billion inhabitants reside in urban settlements with fewer than 300,000 inhabitants, corresponding to 41.5% of the urban population. The pie chart represents the respective shares for 2018, with 42% of the urban population residing in settlements with more than 1 million inhabitants, and 58% of the urban population residing in settlements with fewer than 1 million inhabitants. Almost half of the world’s urban population (48%) live in settlements with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants. Source: adapted from UN DESA 2019, p. 56.