Urbis Think Tank
UN site shows more city dwellers than rural in world’s 7 billion
The UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) has developed a
very neat website called 7 Billion and Me that you can access at http://www.7billionandme.org/.
The site allows you to estimate how many people were on the Earth before you, and how many since.
Of particular relevance to studying cities are the statistics on the proportion of people living in cities versus rural areas.
When I was born, there were around 1/3rd of the world’s population living in cities. Now city dwellers (3.6bn) outnumber rural dwellers (3.4bn). This is a stunning change.
Australia has been much more urbanised than world average, but even we have had an increase of 10.3 million in the cities and only 0.5 million in rural areas since I was born.
It’s a striking demonstration of the critical importance of cities to Australia and the world. And I’ll leave you to calculate my birthdate if you wish!