In 2023, the metropolitan area of New York-Newark-Jersey City had the biggest population in the United States. Based on annual estimates from the census, the metropolitan area had around 19.5 million inhabitants, which was a slight decrease from the previous year. The Los Angeles and Chicago metro areas rounded out the top three. What is a metropolitan statistical area? In general, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is a core urbanized area with a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants – the smallest MSA is Carson City, with an estimated population of nearly 56,000. The urban area is made bigger by adjacent communities that are socially and economically linked to the center. MSAs are particularly helpful in tracking demographic change over time in large communities and allow officials to see where the largest pockets of inhabitants are in the country. How many MSAs are in the United States? There were 421 metropolitan statistical areas across the U.S. as of July 2021. The largest city in each MSA is designated the principal city and will be the first name in the title. An additional two cities can be added to the title, and these will be listed in population order based on the most recent census. So, in the example of New York-Newark-Jersey City, New York has the highest population, while Jersey City has the lowest. The U.S. Census Bureau conducts an official population count every ten years, and the new count is expected to be announced by the end of 2030.

Belgium BE: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data was reported at 18.381 % in 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 18.334 % for 2023. Belgium BE: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data is updated yearly, averaging 17.684 % from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2024, with 65 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 18.435 % in 2021 and a record low of 17.224 % in 1967. Belgium BE: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Belgium – Table BE.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. Population in largest city is the percentage of a country's urban population living in that country's largest metropolitan area.;United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects.;Weighted average;

Armenia AM: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data was reported at 57.819 % in 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 57.429 % for 2023. Armenia AM: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data is updated yearly, averaging 53.328 % from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2024, with 65 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 57.965 % in 2021 and a record low of 48.131 % in 1991. Armenia AM: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Armenia – Table AM.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. Population in largest city is the percentage of a country's urban population living in that country's largest metropolitan area.;United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects.;Weighted average;

In 2025, the degree of urbanization worldwide was at 58 percent. North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean were the regions with the highest level of urbanization, with over four-fifths of the population residing in urban areas. The degree of urbanization defines the share of the population living in areas defined as "cities". On the other hand, less than half of Africa's population lives in urban settlements. Globally, China accounts for over one-quarter of the built-up areas of more than 500,000 inhabitants. The definition of a city differs across various world regions - some countries count settlements with 100 houses or more as urban, while others only include the capital of a country or provincial capitals in their count. Largest agglomerations worldwideThough North America is the most urbanized continent, no U.S. city was among the top ten urban agglomerations worldwide in 2023. Tokyo-Yokohama in Japan was the largest urban area in the world that year, with 37.7 million inhabitants. New York ranked 13th, with 21.4 million inhabitants. Eight of the 10 most populous cities are located in Asia. ConnectivityIt may be hard to imagine how the reality will look in 2050, with 70 percent of the global population living in cities, but some statistics illustrate the ways urban living differs from suburban and rural living. American urbanites may lead more “connected” (i.e., internet-connected) lives than their rural and/or suburban counterparts. As of 2021, around 89 percent of people living in urban areas owned a smartphone. Internet usage was also higher in cities than in rural areas. On the other hand, rural areas always have, and always will, attract those who want to escape the rush of the city.

Urban rural 2023 update

UR 2023 is the first major update of the geography since it was first created in 2018. The update is to ensure UR geographies are relevant and meet criteria before each five-yearly population and dwelling census. UR 2023 contains 13 new rural settlements and 7 new small urban areas. Updates were made to reflect real world change including new subdivisions and motorways, and to improve delineation of urban areas and rural settlements. The Wānaka urban area, whose population has grown to be more than 10,000 based on population estimates, has been reclassified to a medium urban area in the 2023 urban rural indicator.

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In the 2023 classification there are:

• 7 major urban areas
• 13 large urban areas
• 23 medium urban areas
• 152 small urban areas
• 402 rural settlements.

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This dataset is the definitive version of the annually released urban rural (UR) boundaries as at 1 January 2023 as defined by Stats NZ (the custodian), clipped to the coastline. This clipped version has been created for cartographic purposes and so does not fully represent the official full extent boundaries. This version contains 689 UR areas, including 195 urban areas and 402 rural settlements.

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Urban rural (UR) is an output geography that classifies New Zealand into areas that share common urban or rural characteristics and is used to disseminate a broad range of Stats NZ’s social, demographic and economic statistics.

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The UR separately identifies urban areas, rural settlements, other rural areas, and water areas. Urban areas and rural settlements are form-based geographies delineated by the inspection of aerial imagery, local government land designations on district plan maps, address registers, property title data, and any other available information. However, because the underlying meshblock pattern is used to define the geographies, boundaries may not align exactly with local government land designations or what can be seen in aerial images. Other rural areas, and bodies of water represent areas not included within an urban area.

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Urban areas are built from the statistical area 2 (SA2) geography, while rural and water areas are built from the statistical area 1 (SA1) geography.

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Non-digitised

The following 4 non-digitised UR areas have been aggregated from the 16 non-digitised meshblocks/SA2s.

6901; Oceanic outside region, 6902; Oceanic oil rigs, 6903; Islands outside region, 6904; Ross Dependency outside region.

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UR numbering and naming

Each urban area and rural settlement is a single geographic entity with a name and a numeric code.

Other rural areas, inland water areas, and inlets are defined by territorial authority; oceanic areas are defined by regional council; and each have a name and a numeric code.

Urban rural codes have four digits. North Island locations start with a 1, South Island codes start with a 2, oceanic codes start with a 6 and non-digitised codes start with 69.

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Urban rural indicator (IUR)

The accompanying urban rural indicator (IUR) classifies the urban, rural, and water areas by type. Urban areas are further classified by the size of their estimated resident population:

• major urban area – 100,000 or more residents,
• large urban area – 30,000–99,999 residents,
• medium urban area – 10,000–29,999 residents,
• small urban area – 1,000–9,999 residents.

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This was based on 2018 Census data and 2021 population estimates. Their IUR status (urban area size/rural settlement) may change if the 2023 Census population count moves them up or down a category.

The indicators, by name, with their codes in brackets, are:

urban area – major urban (11), large urban (12), medium urban (13), small urban (14),

rural area – rural settlement (21), rural other (22),

water – inland water (31), inlet (32), oceanic (33).

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The urban rural indicator complements the urban rural geography and is an attribute in this dataset. Further information on the urban rural indicator is available on the Stats NZ classification and coding tool ARIA.

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For more information please refer to the Statistical standard for geographic areas 2023.

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Clipped version

This clipped version has been created for cartographic purposes and so does not fully represent the official full extent boundaries.

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Macrons

Names are provided with and without tohutō/macrons. The column name for those without macrons is suffixed ‘ascii’.

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Digital data

Digital boundary data became freely available on 1 July 2007.

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To download geographic classifications in table formats such as CSV please use Ariā

This statistic shows the ten biggest cities in Turkey in 2021. At the end of 2021, approximately 15.2 million people lived in Istanbul, making it the biggest city in Turkey.

The urban population of Turkey

The total population of Turkey is on its way to reaching 80 million inhabitants, which is about the same amouint as the population of Germany. Slightly more than half of the Turkish population live in urban areas, with Istanbul being home to the largest portion of this urban population with close to 14 million inhabitants. This is about 20 percent of the entire population.

Istanbul is located at the entrance to the Black Sea, between Europe and Asia. It is attractive to both the people of Turkey as a place to live and work and foreign tourists who take advantage of its cultural and historic center. Due to its attractiveness and its location at the crossroads of the east and the west, the city has been investing in transportation infrastructure to support its strategic location and increasing growth.

Ankara, the capital of Turkey, is the second largest city and home to about 4.5 million people. Izmir is the third largest, with almost 3 million inhabitants. A vast amount of the country’s population is located in these three metropolises.

A dataset listing Wisconsin cities by population for 2024.

A dataset listing Indiana cities by population for 2024.

A dataset listing Florida cities by population for 2024.

This statistic shows the top 25 cities in the United States with the highest resident population as of July 1, 2022. There were about 8.34 million people living in New York City as of July 2022.

This statistic provides projected figures for the Gross Metropolitan Product (GMP) of the United States in 2021, by metropolitan area. Only the 100 leading metropolitan areas are shown here. In 2022, the GMP of the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area is projected to be around of about **** trillion U.S. dollars. Los Angeles metropolitan areaA metropolitan area in the U.S. is characterized by a relatively high population density and close economic ties through the area, albeit, without the legal incorporation that is found within cities. The Gross Metropolitan Product is measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis under the U.S. Department of Commerce and includes only metropolitan areas. The GMP of the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan area located in California is projected to be among the highest in the United States in 2021, amounting to *** trillion U.S. dollars. The Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, Texas metro area is estimated to be approximately *** billion U.S. dollars in the same year. The Los Angeles metro area had one of the largest populations in the country, totaling ****** million people in 2021. The Greater Los Angeles region has one of the largest economies in the world and is the U.S. headquarters of many international car manufacturers including Honda, Mazda, and Hyundai. Its entertainment industry has generated plenty of tourism and includes world famous beaches, shopping, motion picture studios, and amusement parks. The Hollywood district is known as the “movie capital of the U.S.” and has its historical roots in the country’s film industry. Its port, the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach are aggregately one of the world’s busiest ports. The Port of Los Angelesgenerated some ****** million U.S. dollars in revenue in 2019.

London was by far the largest urban agglomeration in the United Kingdom in 2025, with an estimated population of *** million people, more than three times as large as Manchester, the UK’s second-biggest urban agglomeration. The agglomerations of Birmingham and Leeds / Bradford had the third and fourth-largest populations, respectively, while the biggest city in Scotland, Glasgow, was the fifth largest. Largest cities in Europe Two cities in Europe had larger urban areas than London, with Istanbul having a population of around **** million and the Russian capital Moscow having a population of over **** million. The city of Paris, located just over 200 miles away from London, was the second-largest city in Europe, with a population of more than **** million people. Paris was followed by London in terms of population size, and then by the Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona, at *** million and *** million people, respectively. The Italian capital, Rome, was the next largest city at *** million, followed by Berlin at *** million. London’s population growth Throughout the 1980s, the population of London fluctuated from a high of **** million people in 1981 to a low of **** million inhabitants in 1988. During the 1990s, the population of London increased once again, growing from ****million at the start of the decade to **** million by 1999. London's population has continued to grow since the turn of the century, and despite declining between 2019 and 2021, it reached *** million people in 2023 and is forecast to reach almost *** million by 2047.

This statistic shows the ten largest cities in the United Kingdom in 2021. In 2021, around 8.78 million people lived in London, making it the largest city in the United Kingdom.

In 2025, approximately 23 million people lived in the São Paulo metropolitan area, making it the biggest in Latin America and the Caribbean and the sixth most populated in the world. The homonymous state of São Paulo was also the most populous federal entity in the country. The second place for the region was Mexico City with 22.75 million inhabitants. Brazil's cities Brazil is home to two large metropolises, only counting the population within the city limits, São Paulo had approximately 11.45 million inhabitants, and Rio de Janeiro around 6.21 million inhabitants. It also contains a number of smaller, but well known cities such as Brasília, Salvador, Belo Horizonte and many others, which report between 2 and 3 million inhabitants each. As a result, the country's population is primarily urban, with nearly 88 percent of inhabitants living in cities. Mexico City Mexico City's metropolitan area ranks sevenths in the ranking of most populated cities in the world. Founded over the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521 after the Spanish conquest as the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the city still stands as one of the most important in Latin America. Nevertheless, the preeminent economic, political, and cultural position of Mexico City has not prevented the metropolis from suffering the problems affecting the rest of the country, namely, inequality and violence. Only in 2023, the city registered a crime incidence of 52,723 reported cases for every 100,000 inhabitants and around 24 percent of the population lived under the poverty line.

In 2021, the per capita income in San Francisco city was at 80,383 U.S. dollars. San Francisco was followed in this regard by Seattle and Washington, D.C. The most populated cities in the U.S. are ranked by per capita income in this statistic. While New York, New York had the highest population, San Francisco had the highest per capita income in 2021. The median household income in San Francisco in 2020 was 119,136 dollars, the highest among the most populated cities in the United States.

South Africa is the sixth African country with the largest population, counting approximately 60.5 million individuals as of 2021. In 2023, the largest city in South Africa was Cape Town. The capital of Western Cape counted 3.4 million inhabitants, whereas South Africa's second largest city was Durban (eThekwini Municipality), with 3.1 million inhabitants. Note that when observing the number of inhabitants by municipality, Johannesburg is counted as largest city/municipality of South Africa.

From four provinces to nine provinces

Before Nelson Mandela became president in 1994, the country had four provinces, Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal and 10 “homelands” (also called Bantustans). The four larger regions were for the white population while the homelands for its black population. This system was dismantled following the new constitution of South Africa in 1996 and reorganized into nine provinces. Currently, Gauteng is the most populated province with around 15.9 million people residing there, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with 11.68 million inhabiting the province. As of 2022, Black African individuals were almost 81 percent of the total population in the country, while colored citizens followed amounting to around 5.34 million.

A diverse population

Although the majority of South Africans are identified as Black, the country’s population is far from homogenous, with different ethnic groups usually residing in the different “homelands”. This can be recognizable through the various languages used to communicate between the household members and externally. IsiZulu was the most common language of the nation with around a quarter of the population using it in- and outside of households. IsiXhosa and Afrikaans ranked second and third with roughly 15 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

Throughout the early modern period, the largest city in Italy was Naples. The middle ages saw many metropolitan areas along the Mediterranean grow to become the largest in Europe, as they developed into meeting ports for merchants travelling between the three continents. Italy, throughout this time, was not a unified country, but rather a collection of smaller states that had many cultural similarities, and political control of these cities regularly shifted over the given period. Across this time, the population of each city generally grew between each century, but a series of plague outbreaks in the 1600s devastated the populations of Italy's metropolitan areas, which can be observed here. Naples At the beginning of the 1500s, the Kingdom of Naples was taken under the control of the Spanish crown, where its capital grew to become the largest city in the newly-expanding Spanish Empire. Prosperity then grew in the 16th and 17th centuries, before the city's international importance declined in the 18th century. There is also a noticeable dip in Naples' population size between 1600 and 1700, due to an outbreak of plague in 1656 that almost halved the population. Today, Naples is just the third largest city in Italy, behind Rome and Milan. Rome Over 2,000 years ago, Rome became the first city in the world to have a population of more than one million people, and in 2021, it was Italy's largest city with a population of 2.8 million; however it did go through a period of great decline in the middle ages. After the Fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476CE, Rome's population dropped rapidly, below 100,000 inhabitants in 500CE. 1,000 years later, Rome was an important city in Europe as it was the seat of the Catholic Church, and it had a powerful banking sector, but its population was just 55,000 people as it did not have the same appeal for merchants or migrants held by the other port cities. A series of reforms by the Papacy in the late-1500s then saw significant improvements to infrastructure, housing, and sanitation, and living standards rose greatly. Over the following centuries, the Papacy consolidated its power in the center of the Italian peninsula, which brought stability to the region, and the city of Rome became a cultural center. Across this period, Rome's population grew almost three times larger, which was the highest level of growth of these cities.

Monaco led the ranking for countries with the highest population density in 2024, with nearly 26,000 residents per square kilometer. The Special Administrative Region of Macao came in second, followed by Singapore. The world’s second smallest country Monaco is the world’s second-smallest country, with an area of about two square kilometers and a population of only around 40,000. It is a constitutional monarchy located by the Mediterranean Sea, and while Monaco is not part of the European Union, it does participate in some EU policies. The country is perhaps most famous for the Monte Carlo casino and for hosting the Monaco Grand Prix, the world's most prestigious Formula One race. The global population Globally, the population density per square kilometer is about 60 inhabitants, and Asia is the most densely populated region in the world. The global population is increasing rapidly, so population density is only expected to increase. In 1950, for example, the global population stood at about 2.54 billion people, and it reached over eight billion during 2023.

Rome is the most populous city in Italy. With 2.75 million inhabitants, the capital of the country put ahead Milan and Naples. Compared to the number of citizens in 2012, the resident population of Rome increased by over 140,000 individuals. Regional data Rome is located in the center of Italy in the Lazio region. Lazio is the second-largest region in terms of population size after Lombardy. In 2024, the region counts roughly 5.7 million inhabitants, whereas Lombardy has over ten million individuals. The third-largest region is Campania, with 5.6 million people. Naples, the major center of Campania, has around 910,000 inhabitants at the beginning of 2024. Nevertheless, this city was, back in the 19th century, one of the largest cities in Western Europe. Tourism in Rome The Eternal City is also the main tourist destination in Italy and was the eighth most-visited city in Europe. The largest groups of international visitors in Rome came from the United States of America, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Every year, more and more tourists also enjoy the best-known tourist attractions in Rome, like the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Palatine Hill, which together recorded almost ten million visitors in 2022.

In 2024, approximately 67 percent of the total population in China lived in cities. The urbanization rate has increased steadily in China over the last decades. Degree of urbanization in China Urbanization is generally defined as a process of people migrating from rural to urban areas, during which towns and cities are formed and increase in size. Even though urbanization is not exclusively a modern phenomenon, industrialization and modernization did accelerate its progress. As shown in the statistic at hand, the degree of urbanization of China, the world's second-largest economy, rose from 36 percent in 2000 to around 51 percent in 2011. That year, the urban population surpassed the number of rural residents for the first time in the country's history.The urbanization rate varies greatly in different parts of China. While urbanization is lesser advanced in western or central China, in most coastal regions in eastern China more than two-thirds of the population lives already in cities. Among the ten largest Chinese cities in 2021, six were located in coastal regions in East and South China. Urbanization in international comparison Brazil and Russia, two other BRIC countries, display a much higher degree of urbanization than China. On the other hand, in India, the country with the worlds’ largest population, a mere 36.3 percent of the population lived in urban regions as of 2023. Similar to other parts of the world, the progress of urbanization in China is closely linked to modernization. From 2000 to 2024, the contribution of agriculture to the gross domestic product in China shrank from 14.7 percent to 6.8 percent. Even more evident was the decrease of workforce in agriculture.