Urbanisation Trends
The Century We All Moved to the City
For most of human history, cities were the exception — and sometime in 2007, for the first time ever, more people on Earth lived in one than didn't.
The Idea
The 2007 crossover — when urban population tipped above 50% globally — sounds like a neat statistic, but it represents something genuinely unprecedented in the human story. For roughly 10,000 years of settled civilisation, the vast majority of people lived close to the land they farmed. Cities existed, of course — Rome, Chang'an, Tenochtitlan — but they were nodes in an overwhelmingly rural world, dependent on the countryside for everything from grain to labour. What changed in the 20th century was speed. Urbanisation had been building since the Industrial Revolution, but the real acceleration happened after 1950, and it's still happening now. The UN estimates that by 2050, roughly two-thirds of humanity will be urban. This isn't happening uniformly. Europe and North America urbanised early and have largely plateaued. The front line of the shift is now sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, where cities are absorbing population at a rate that has no historical parallel — not even the mill towns of 19th-century England. What makes this genuinely strange is that urbanisation in the developing world isn't always following the old script of industrialisation-first. People are moving to cities not necessarily because factory jobs await them, but because cities offer services, networks, and possibility — even when formal employment is scarce. Economists call this 'urbanisation without growth,' and it's reshaping what we think cities are actually for.
In the World
Lagos offers one of the sharpest illustrations of what rapid urbanisation actually looks like on the ground. In 1950, it was a modest colonial port city of around 300,000 people. Today, estimates of its metropolitan population range from 15 to 24 million — the uncertainty itself is telling, because the city is growing faster than anyone can reliably count. What's striking about Lagos isn't just the scale but the texture. Much of its growth has been driven not by formal urban planning but by the logic of the street: informal settlements, self-built neighbourhoods, markets that materialise overnight and persist for decades. The district of Makoko, a waterborne slum built on stilts in a lagoon, is home to somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people — again, nobody is quite sure — and has existed in its current form for generations, entirely outside official city systems. And yet Lagos functions. It has a GDP larger than many African nations. It produces music, fashion, film, and software. Its 'jollof wars' with Ghana trend globally on social media. Urban theorists like Rem Koolhaas have argued that Lagos represents not a failed city but a different kind of city — one that reveals what urban life looks like when it outpaces the institutions meant to manage it. Whether that's a cautionary tale or a model depends, it turns out, on what you think cities are fundamentally for.
Why It Matters
Most of the big questions of the next century — climate change, economic inequality, political instability, public health — will be shaped by how urbanisation plays out. Cities are, per capita, more energy-efficient and more innovative than dispersed settlements. But they also concentrate vulnerability: a city built on a flood plain, or dependent on a single aquifer, becomes a crisis waiting for a trigger. There's also something more personal here. If you live in a city, you are living inside the dominant experiment of our species right now. The anonymity, density, and diversity you navigate daily are historically strange — and historically powerful. The sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in 1903 that city life fundamentally rewires the self, producing a new kind of person: faster, more defensive, more stimulated, more free. That rewriting is still happening, at a pace and scale Simmel couldn't have imagined. Understanding urbanisation isn't just about geography or economics. It's about grasping the shape of the world that most humans are now building — and deciding what we want that world to actually be.
A Question to Ponder
If cities are where humanity is increasingly choosing to live, what does that tell us about what human beings actually want — and what do we risk losing in the move?
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