Population Living in Cities (Degree of Urbanisation), 1954

Showing 25 of 222 countries · select a heading to sort

Population Living in Cities (Degree of Urbanisation), 1954: every country, as published by UN DESA Population Division.

Country	Population living in cities, Degree of Urbanisation (%)	Population in towns and semi-dense areas (%)	Population in rural areas (%)
Vatican CityVATSouthern Europe	100.000	0.000	0.000
MacauMACEastern Asia	90.434	8.930	0.637
Hong KongHKGEastern Asia	89.634	8.223	2.143
SingaporeSGPSouth-eastern Asia	87.247	12.466	0.287
MaltaMLTSouthern Europe	66.398	24.401	9.200
United KingdomGBRNorthern Europe	55.553	28.666	15.781
JapanJPNEastern Asia	46.756	40.324	12.920
UruguayURYSouth America	46.343	34.534	19.123
TaiwanTWNEastern Asia	45.023	42.042	12.935
JamaicaJAMCaribbean	43.954	23.142	32.904
BarbadosBRBCaribbean	43.047	44.276	12.677
ArgentinaARGSouth America	42.752	31.798	25.450
Republic of the CongoCOGMiddle Africa	42.667	31.020	26.313
KuwaitKWTWestern Asia	41.486	46.581	11.933
LebanonLBNWestern Asia	39.537	40.342	20.121
NetherlandsNLDWestern Europe	37.942	39.577	22.481
South KoreaKOREastern Asia	36.739	36.402	26.859
Trinidad and TobagoTTOCaribbean	36.103	44.823	19.075
MauritiusMUSEastern Africa	34.977	45.816	19.207
GreeceGRCSouthern Europe	34.348	29.605	36.047
North KoreaPRKEastern Asia	33.996	48.421	17.584
RussiaRUSEastern Europe	33.598	39.092	27.310
UkraineUKREastern Europe	33.109	34.616	32.275
ArmeniaARMWestern Asia	33.020	28.059	38.920
SpainESPSouthern Europe	32.555	35.033	32.412

Neither end is better. The values describe a shape, not a score. The middle country reads 10.691. “Shared” marks a value another country also holds.

Each measure’s ends

• Population in towns and semi-dense areas (%)

  Highest2 share it

  Lowest17 share it

  Middle country: 36.106

• Population in rural areas (%)

  Highest16 share it

  Lowest3 share it

  Middle country: 48.239

• +0 / −0countries joined / left
• 142values changed, of 222 in both
• 133 · 9rose · fell
• 80unchanged

Both years come from the same release, so a difference here is a change in the data, not a revision of it. Every country’s full history is charted on the statistic page.

• .csv

  For a spreadsheet or code

  222 rows · 8.9 KB · UTF-8, opens in Excel

  Opens with 11 lines of source notes; the table starts on row 13.

  Download population-in-cities-1954-nations-inquiry.csv
• ↗

  The publisher’s original

  UN DESA Population Division’s own file, on its own site.

  WUP2025-F02-Degree-of-Urbanization_percPop_by_category.xlsx

What this site changed: Reshaped into one row per country: regional and income-group totals are left out, only the columns listed are kept, each row gets its ISO 3166 code, and some country names are brought to one spelling. No value is recalculated, rescaled or rounded.

Licence: CC BY 3.0 IGO. The version of CC BY written for intergovernmental organisations. Credit the publisher and say what you changed.

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