Population

Cities and towns

Urban centres, towns and rural land in the GHSL settlement grid for 2020.

Equal Earth map of GHSL settlement classes for 2020: red urban centres, orange towns, olive rural land — Map: Fix Planet from the European Commission GHSL GHS-SMOD R2023A, 2020 epoch. Red is an urban centre (class 30), orange is a town or semi-dense cluster (classes 21 to 23), olive is rural (classes 11 to 13), counted on a 0.02° grid. CC BY 4.0. Boundaries: Natural Earth.

Population 2020 GHS-SMOD R2023A

What

The plate is the 2020 epoch of GHS-SMOD R2023A, the Global Human Settlement Layer settlement classification, and the latest epoch in that release built from satellite observations. The 30 arc-second classes are counted by majority onto a 0.02° grid. Red is an urban centre (class 30). Orange is a town or semi-dense cluster (classes 21, 22 and 23). Olive is rural (classes 11, 12 and 13). Most of the land area is the rural class.

Why on this shelf

The grid is the settlement class of the land, drawn the same way in every country. It is not a national percent-urban figure and not a count of people.

How to read it

Red marks urban centres, orange marks towns and semi-dense areas, and olive marks rural cells. There is no numeric bar: the three colours are those class groups. Water in the settlement grid, and Natural Earth lakes, stay uncoloured.

Caveats

Class 30 is an urban centre in the GHSL classification, not every place a country calls a city. Aside: the 2025 and 2030 epochs in the same release are model projections, and they are not this map. The plate does not show how many people live in each class.