Though in ancient times, famous cities were the seats of utilization and culture, the bulk of world’s population has, till recently, and lived in rural areas. Till about 1800, hardly three per cent to the world’s population was urban.

“The emergence of cities as quantitatively important points of population accumulation can be added as major event of the nineteenth century.”

Levels of Urbanisation:

Which presents the urban and rural population in major areas and regions of the world as estimated by the United Nations for the year 1985, indicates that there are wide variations in the levels of urbanisation.

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It has been estimated that 41.57 per cent of the world population lived in urban areas in 1985. (Here, of course, it is to be noted that different countries adopt different definitions of “Urban,” and though these percentages are not strictly comparable, comparisons are made by simply accepting whatever definition each country itself adopts).

The discrepancy between the developing regions and the developed regions with respect to the level of urbanisation is quite glaring. While 72 per cent of the population of the developed regions has been estimated as urban, this percentage is only 32 of the developing countries.

Among the continents of the world, both Asia (28.26 per cent) and Africa (32.00 per cent) may be observed to have low levels of urbanisation. The levels of urbanisation in the sub-regions and these continents.

For instance, the percentage of urban population in the various sub-regions of Africa ranges from 18.75 (Eastern Africa) to 51.35 (Southern Africa). Similarly, in Asia, in a country like Japan 76.67 per cent of the population is urban, whereas in Eastern South Asia and Middle South Asia about one-fourth of the population is urban.

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In East Asia, excluding China and Japan, 66.67 per cent of the population is urban and in Western Asia this percentage is 55.75. Northern America records a very high percentage of urban population that is 74.24, followed by Europe (73.37 per cent), Oceania (72.00) and the USSR (66.31 per cent).

Some of the sub-areas having high percentages of urban population are Northern Europe (86.75), Temperate South America (84.44) and Western Europe (81.17).

One interesting point which emerges from Table 11.7 is that though the level of urbanisation is low in the developing regions, the urban population living in these regions constitutes a little more than half of the urban population of the world.

Similarly, though the level of urbanisation is low in Asia, the Asian urban population constitutes a little more than one-third of the urban population of the world.

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The reason for this phenomenon is that the population of the developing regions itself is very large, constituting a little less than three-fourths of the world population.

Similarly, the population of Asia is itself very large, with “population giants” like China and India claiming two-thirds of the total world population, urban as well as rural.

The percentages of urban population in selected less developed countries around 1990, along with the proportion of urban population living in cities with 100,000 populations and more. It is evident that most of the less developed countries had very low percentages of urban population.

In Asian countries like India (25.72 per cent), Indonesia (22.4 per cent), Sri Lanka (21.5 per cent) and Thailand (17.0 per cent), these percentages were mostly below 30.

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In many developed countries, around 1980, about three-fourths or even more of the population was urban. Some examples of such countries are Australia (86.0 per cent), Sweden (82.7 per cent), Denmark (82.6 per cent), the United Kingdom (78.0 per cent), the United States (73.7 per cent), Japan (76.2 per cent), and France (73.4 per cent). In the erstwhile USSR, 64.1 per cent of the population was urban in 1982 while in Romania the percentage of urban population was 48.5.