Points showing that how unfair it is that cities only have industries while villages dont
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Aerial view showing urbanization on Luzon island, Philippines. (Photo: CherylRamalho / Shutterstock)
Aerial view showing urbanization on Luzon island, Philippines. (Photo: CherylRamalho / Shutterstock)
Because national definitions of urban and rural areas differ significantly from one country to another, it is difficult to compare these areas across national borders. If we can’t compare the performance of urban or rural areas across national borders, then we can’t learn from policies used in other countries. It also means we cannot meaningfully compare the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs) indicators for urban and rural areas across countries.
To facilitate international comparisons, a coalition of six international organizations developed a new global definition of cities, towns and semi-dense areas, and rural areas. On March 5th, the UN Statistical Commission endorsed the Degree of Urbanization as a recommended method for international comparisons.
Many countries use a minimum population size to define an urban area, but that size can be 200 (as in Denmark), 2,000 (Argentina), 5,000 (India) or 50,000 (Japan) or even 100,000 (China). Some countries don’t use a statistical definition but designate urban areas by administrative decision. In other countries, the sectoral employment or provision of infrastructure and services is used to determine whether settlements should be classified as urban or rural.
Finally, once categorized as urban or rural, places are rarely recategorized. Some of this resistance may come from the allocation of fiscal transfers – consider India, where getting reclassified as urban may cause places to lose government transfers, or Egypt, where getting reclassified as urban would trigger additional public investment for higher-level service delivery requirements, including police stations and courthouses.
A wide-angle view to measure urbanization
We decided to take a wide-angle view to facilitate comparability across countries. By introducing an objective and data-driven approach to measuring poverty and applying this approach globally , the Degree of Urbanization seeks to do for the definition of urban what the $1/day poverty line did for poverty measurement in the 1990s.
The Degree of Urbanization identifies three types of settlements:
Cities, which have a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per km2);
Towns and semi-dense areas, which have a population of at least 5,000 inhabitants in contiguous grid cells with a density of at least 300 inhabitants per km2; and
Rural areas, which consist mostly of low-density grid cells (2).
This new approach offers several advantages: