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City Growth

Map No. 190

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There are many reasons to move to the town or city. Some people may no-longer be able to subsist in a rural area, or maybe the opportunities of the city are an incentive to move. Some of the forecasted increase in urban populations between 2002 and 2015 is due to birth rates exceeding death rates within a city.

A total increase of 888 million people living in urban areas is predicted in 186 territories. In the remaining 14 territories, no change or a fall is expected, totalling 6.5 million.

By 2015, an extra 22% of the 2002 population of Indonesia is expected to live in urban areas. An extra 25% of people living in the Philippines will be urban dwellers by this time.

"Massive urbanisation means hundreds of already near-bankrupt cities trying to cope in 20 years with the kind of problems London or New York only managed to address with difficulty in 150 years." John Vidal, 2004

Territory size shows the proportion of all extra people that will start living in urban areas between 2002 and 2015, in each territory.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page