Urbanization: the move to the city
A timeline that doubles as a control. The year slider fills a grid of one hundred people and moves the regional bars beside it; every milestone below has a button that jumps the explorer to its year. The dots are plain HTML elements in a CSS grid, the timeline is an ordered list with a pseudo-element for its spine.
One hundred people
world
58 of every 100 people live in towns and cities
- Urban
- Rural
Urban share by region
2025Tick: the region's 1950 level. Regions move in five-year steps.
Milestones
-
Fewer than three in ten
28.8% of the world lives in towns and cities. Europe and Oceania already have urban majorities; in Africa and Asia it is about one person in seven.
28.8% -
South America tips urban
51.1% of South Americans live in cities by 1960, up from 43.8% a decade earlier. By 2025 the share reaches 85.5%, the highest of any region.
51.1% -
Asia stalls
Asia's urban share barely moves for a decade, from 22.5% in 1960 to 23.6% in 1970, as China sends millions of urban youth to the countryside.
23.6% -
Oceania peaks
Oceania's urban share tops out at 72.0% and drifts down after it, to 67.6% in 2025: the one region where the countryside has outgrown the cities for half a century.
72.0% -
The urban majority
For the first time, more people live in cities than in the countryside: 50.4% of the world, up from 49.9% the year before.
50.4% -
Asia crosses half
Home to more than half the world's people, Asia becomes majority urban, at 50.2% in 2017 after tripling its share since 1950.
50.2% -
57.8% and climbing
Africa, at 46.4%, is the last major region with a rural majority, and its share rose faster than any other region's over the last five years, by 2.1 points.
57.8%
Data
Data table
| Year |
|---|
Share of the population living in urban areas, %.
How it's built
-
The dot matrix is a hundred
<i>elements in a ten-column CSS grid; a slider togglesdata-urbanon the first n of them, and a transition does the animation. - The regional bars are one SVG redrawn at its real width; they keep their elements between years, so the bars glide instead of jumping.
-
The timeline is an
<ol>: the spine is a gradient::beforeon the list, each dot a::beforeon an item, and each progress meter a--sharecustom property.
Source: UN World Urbanization Prospects (2025 revision), as compiled by Our World in Data. Urban areas follow each country's own definition, so a town in one country may count as rural in another.
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