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urbanization — not how urban a country is, but how fast that is changing. Each value is the average annual change over the preceding five years.","A positive value means urbanization is accelerating: a growing share of the population lives in cities. A negative value means the urban share is shrinking — which is rare but has occurred in some countries during economic downturns or conflict.","Countries define \"urban\" differently — some use a population threshold, others use density, administrative status, or the type of work people do. This makes these figures most useful for tracking change within a single country over time. Cross-country comparisons should be treated with caution.","The UN now publishes these national-definitions estimates mainly for continuity with earlier statistics. For cross-country comparisons, a better choice is the [Degree of Urbanization (DEGURBA)](https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/degurbaDefinitions.php) framework, which applies the same density and settlement-size thresholds everywhere. Our charts using [DEGURBA data](https://ourworldindata.org/search?datasetProducts=Global+Human+Settlement+Layer+Dataset) use this harmonized standard."],"origins":[{"id":12558,"titleSnapshot":"World Urbanization Prospects 2025 - Urbanization Rate of Change (File 17)","title":"World Urbanization Prospects 2025 - Average Annual Rate of Change of Percentage Urban and Rural by National Definition","descriptionSnapshot":"File 17 contains the average annual rate of change of the percentage urban and rural by national definitions. Data are presented in three sheets: Rural, Urban, and Total, showing how quickly urbanization levels are changing each year from 1950 to 2050.","description":"Average annual rate of change of the percentage of population living in urban and rural areas based on national definitions. The dataset provides the rate of change in urbanization levels by region, subregion, country and area from 1950 to 2050.\n\nNational definitions of \"urban\" vary considerably from country to country. Criteria such as population size, population density, type of economic activity, physical characteristics, level of infrastructure, or a combination of these may be used to define urban areas.","producer":"United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division","citationFull":"United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2025). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2025 Revision, Online Edition. POP/DB/WUP/Rev.2025/F17","urlMain":"https://population.un.org/wup/","urlDownload":"https://population.un.org/wup/assets/Download/Countries%20and%20Aggregates/WUP2025-F17-National-Definitions_percPop_rate_by_category.xlsx","dateAccessed":"2025-02-17","datePublished":"2025","license":{"url":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/","name":"CC BY 3.0 IGO"}}]}