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Number of countries with a given minimum urban population threshold,
2018

The number of countries that have adopted a given minimum population threshold (number of inhabitants) for classification of an'urban area'.

100,000 inhabitants150,000 inhabitants130,000 inhabitants120,000 inhabitants310,000 inhabitants139,000 inhabitants15,000 inhabitants234,000 inhabitants13,000 inhabitants32,000 inhabitants222,500 inhabitants111,500 inhabitants61,000 inhabitants9600 inhabitants1500 inhabitants1400 inhabitants1300 inhabitants1200 inhabitants4150 inhabitants1No minimum population threshold129

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Number of countries with a given minimum urban population threshold

See all data and research on:
Urbanization

What you should know about this indicator

  • There is no consistent definition of what constitutes an 'urban area'. This is highly variable across countries. This data presents the number of countries with given minimum thresholds of inhabitants needed for an area to be defined an 'urban area'. For many countries, there is no defined threshold based on inhabitants; other metrics such as population density, infrastructure, or even pre-defined cities may be used.
  • Note that some countries with minimum inhabitant thresholds noted here also require additional qualities (such as population density) to be met.
Number of countries with a given minimum urban population threshold
The number of countries which have adopted a given minimum population threshold (number of inhabitants) for classification of an 'urban area'.
Source
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
January 17, 2024
Date range
2018–2018
Unit
countries

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

This dataset is derived from the World Urbanization Prospects, providing comprehensive data on global urbanization trends, including population figures, urban and rural population distributions, and projections for future urban growth.

Retrieved on
January 17, 2024
Retrieved from
https://population.un.org/wup/Download/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, Online Edition.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Number of countries with a given minimum urban population threshold”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2024) - “Urbanization”. Data adapted from United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-with-minimum-urban-threshold [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Number of countries with a given minimum urban population threshold” [dataset]. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “World Urbanization Prospects Dataset” [original data]. Retrieved April 20, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-with-minimum-urban-threshold

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