July 15, 2018

New analysis says 84% of people live in cities

Planetizen - [A] new analysis from the European Commission directly contradicts widely cited figures from the United Nations that half the world's population lives in cities.

"Using a definition made possible by advances in geospatial technology that uses high-resolution satellite images to determine the number of people living in a given area, they estimate 84 percent of the world's population, or almost 6.4 billion people, live in urban areas," according to [Gregpry] Scruggs.

The article gets into the reasons for the discrepancy—caused by what the article describes as inaccuracies of the reporting used by the United Nations, caused in part by varying definitions of what defines an urban area. "For example, India defines a city as a place where at least 75 percent of males are not working in the agricultural sector," explains Scruggs.

No comments: