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Urban Estimates and Projections at the United Nations: The Strengths, Weaknesses, and Underpinnings of the World Urbanization Prospects

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Abstract

For about five decades, the United Nations Population Division has produces a comprehensive demographic account of the global urbanization process, now known as the biennial “World Urbanization Prospects”. This article describes the evolution of this unique data source from its inception to its 19th issues as the 2011 Revision and gives an overview about the statistical data sources used for the estimation of past and future trends, the models used for estimation and projection and the tools that have been developed to carry out the tasks. The article finally discusses the as yet unsuccessful demand for more compatible and comparable statistical definition or urban and city populations, addresses some alternative approaches and offers some ideas about possible improvements to the current methodology.

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Notes

  1. The generic term location is used for what is commonly referred to as towns, cities, urban agglomerations or metropolitan areas, as the case may be for a particular country.

  2. The actual revision available at the time this article was written was the 2011 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects (United Nations 2012a, b).

  3. For a more detailed account of the early years of the World Urbanization Prospects, see United Nations (1987).

  4. Like the World Urbanization Prospects, the World Population Prospects had different titles in their earlier Revision. The 1963 Revision’s title is “World Population Prospects as Assessed in 1963”.

  5. Thomas Brinkhoff: City Population, http://www.citypopulation.de

  6. Tokelau is, according to United Nations definition, a Non-Self Governing Territory, administered by New Zealand.

  7. There is no complete list available with all urban locations in all countries. Current United Nations census recommendations recommend that countries tabulate only principal localities and of their urban agglomerations, that is urban locations above a specified size, as defined by each country (United Nations 2008a, b, c, p. 263). Also recommended is a listing of population by size-class of locality, which includes all settlements, but does not provide data on individual settlements (ibid. p. 262). The Demographic Yearbook of the United Nations provides only population data on cities or urban agglomerations with 100,000 or more inhabitants, while the Population Division’s collection of city populations has traditionally limited its published urban settlements to 750,000 at the time of the revision. A complete coverage of all cities in the Population Division’s database is therefore currently not possible.

  8. The final projections of agglomerated populations (e.g. of populations living in urban locations with 20,000 inhabitants or more) was carried out by calculating a weighted average of four different scenarios, each with a plausible of constant future growth rate, UN (1969), p. 56.

  9. For a discussion of urban growth in developing countries, see Preston (1979). Samuel Preston was also a main contributor to the development of the United Nations method.

  10. The difference between the growth rate of a particular city and the growth rate of the total urban population.

  11. Adjusting projected excess growth of city population relative to the total urban population is a rare phenomenon and occurs only in countries with few but large cities.

  12. The primary key for this table is a composite key consisting of all 9 fields. The database ensures referential integrity by enforcing that only one entry/row in the database can have a particular combination of these nine fields. Duplicate entries are therefore impossible.

  13. The thresholds are: population size (settlement with 50,000 or more inhabitants), population density (150 people per square kilometer) and travel time (60 min or less to the nearest large city).

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    Thomas Buettner

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Buettner, T. Urban Estimates and Projections at the United Nations: The Strengths, Weaknesses, and Underpinnings of the World Urbanization Prospects. Spat Demogr 3, 91–108 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-015-0004-2

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