Sovereign and dependent territory rows of the World Bank “Urban population (% of total population)” indicator (top 30 by most recent year). Aggregates (region.id === “NA”) excluded.
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How to use this chart
Play/Pause starts and stops the year-by-year animation, the year slider jumps to any year, and the speed selector (0.5×, 1×, 2×) changes playback speed. Each year shows the top 12 entries out of the 30 held in the dataset.
About this ranking
About this metric. “Urban Population Share by Country (Time Series)” reformats data published by the World Bank (World Bank indicator code SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS). Values are expressed in %.
What to watch. Follow China: from under 20% urban in the early 1980s to over 60% — several hundred million people moving to cities, the largest migration in human history, drawn as a single lengthening bar. 2007, when the world first became majority-urban, is the other milestone.
Caveats. Each country defines “urban” its own way — by population size, density or administrative status — so Japan’s 92% and another country’s figure are not strictly the same yardstick. City-states sit at 100% by definition; read levels and trends rather than ranks.
Trends in the data
Rank means almost nothing at the top of this table. Twelve countries and territories read exactly 100.00% in 2024 — four in ten of the thirty share first place. Seven were already at 100% in 1960, and the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Monaco, Nauru, Singapore, Sint Maarten and Saint Martin have not moved once in 65 years. As a chart it is seven flat horizontal lines lying on top of each other, which is hard to read as a competition.
The same thing is happening at the bottom. The spread between top and bottom shrank from 87.40 percentage points in 1960 to 8.57 points in 2024, close to a tenth of what it was. The lowest in 2024 is Gabon at 91.86%, so all thirty are above 90%. The 30-country average rose from 76.05% in 1960 to 96.49% in 2024. When an indicator is capped at 100%, differences inevitably vanish as the top saturates.
Under that ceiling, the country that moved most is Gabon: 12.60% in 1960, 32.00% in 1970, 55.24% in 1980, 69.28% in 1990, 79.57% in 2000, 86.19% in 2010 and 91.86% in 2024. That is 7.29× and 79.26 percentage points in 64 years. A country that was by far the lowest of the thirty in 1960 is now above 90%. Jordan rose from 42.71% to 92.95%, Puerto Rico from 44.31% to 94.25% and San Marino from 48.90% to 97.16%.
On rank changes, the climbers are Kuwait (18th → 6th), San Marino (26th → 14th), Bahrain (12th → 1st) and Qatar (22nd → 13th); the fallers are the Northern Mariana Islands (15th → 27th), Israel (17th → 29th), Curaçao (19th → 30th) and Iceland (13th → 21st). But the 2024 field is packed into 8.57 points, from 91.43% to 100%, so these rank gaps rest on very small differences in value. Each country defines “urban” for itself, and a reading of 100% usually means the whole territory is classified as urban. Note also that the top-30 cut by latest value leaves out the United States, France, Germany and China.
Trivia quiz
What is the process of people moving from countryside to cities, raising the urban share, called?
Urbanization, which has advanced worldwide alongside industrialization and economic development. (Source)
What is the name for an urban area with more than 10 million people?
A megacity, such as Tokyo, Delhi or Shanghai; their number keeps growing. (Source)
Around what year did the UN estimate the world's urban population first exceeded its rural population?
Around 2007-2008; the global urban share has kept rising since. (Source)
Source
World Bank — Urban population (% of total population) (SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS)