How to measure the degree of urbanization and define urban and rural areas?

Many countries use the minimum number of inhabitants to define an urban area, but this can be 200 in Denmark, 2,000  in Argentina, 5,000 in India or 50,000 in Japan. Other countries, designate urban areas by administrative decision. And others consider the level of employment or provision of infrastructure and services. This situation hampers, for example, comparisons of performance in Sustainable Development Goals indicators of urban and rural areas in different countries of the world.

To solve this issue, the European Commission together with 5 international organizations developed ‘A recommendation on the method to delineate cities, urban and rural areas for international statistical comparisons’.

On March 5th, the UN Statistical Commission endorsed this new method, called the Degree of Urbanization.

The Degree of Urbanization identifies three types of settlements:

1. Cities, which have a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per km2);
2. Towns and semi-dense areas, which have a population of at least 5,000 inhabitants in contiguous grid cells with a density of at least 300 inhabitants per km2; and
3. Rural areas, which consist mostly of low-density grid cells.

This new approach offers several advantages:

• Simplicity and transparency. 
• Driven by population size and density. 
• It helps monitor progress on the SDGs. 
• It captures agglomeration economies. 
• Cost-effective monitoring. 

Download the PDF: https://europa.eu/capacity4dev/public-environment-climate/documents/rec…