Economic Capacity Categorization of Cities

There is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes an urban area. A city typically refers to a geographic area that conforms to a political, jurisdictional, or administrative boundary. Many contiguous urban areas or urban agglomerations, however, extend well beyond a city’s jurisdictional boundaries. Most countries define urban areas by a single population or density threshold. Many countries use a low threshold to identify urban areas. In this dataset, the urban agglomerations from Oxford Economics’ Global Cities 2030 database are used to define the extent of cities.

Much of the data used is derived from national censuses, and several countries have not conducted a census in more than a decade.

All projections are based on historical patterns; factors such as conflicts, pandemics, migration, climate change, economic recessions, and natural disasters, among others, can all influence future urbanization, but are not accounted for in the projections.

When cities are grouped into broad categories for the sake of comparison and generalizations, diversity is muted and nuance is lost. For example, many countries have tremendous diversity between primary cities and secondary cities, yet this is difficult to show with the city categorizations used in the dataset.