Event · Milestone

World becomes majority urban

2007 · Global
Chart of world urban against rural population, the two curves crossing in the later 2000s when humanity became majority urban
Chart of world urban against rural population, the two curves crossing in the later 2000s when humanity became majority urban · CC BY 4.0 · Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, Our World in Data

What it is

In 2007 the United Nations estimated that, for the first time in recorded history, more than half of the world's population lived in urban areas rather than rural ones. The shift was driven by decades of rural-to-urban migration and natural growth concentrated in the rapidly expanding cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It marked a demographic threshold humanity had never previously crossed. Projections at the time anticipated the urban share rising toward two-thirds by the middle of the century.

Why it matters

The crossing made the city, rather than the countryside, the default setting of human life and thus of human-environment management. It reframed urban planning from a specialist concern into a central instrument for housing, health, climate and economic policy worldwide.

Plans it shaped

See it on the timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.