Rapid Urbanization

Season 3 · Introduction

What is rapid urbanisation?

Look out of the window. Do you see a crane, a new housing estate or a commuter rail station being extended? What you see is urbanisation in practice. The word means that people move from the countryside to cities and towns, and that those towns grow to make room for everyone moving in. In Swedish statistics, an urban area is a continuous built-up area with at least 200 inhabitants where the houses stand close together: no more than 150 metres between houses in the core. That means even quite small places count as urban areas.

Sweden has already made most of that journey. According to the UN Population Division, 72% of Sweden's population already lived in cities and towns in 1960. In 2023, 88% lived in urban areas, just over 9.2 million people, according to Statistics Sweden. So almost the whole country already lives in what the rest of the world is now in the middle of, and has done for a long time.

Globally the journey looks different, and it is not finished. In 1960, 34% of the world's population lived in cities, according to the same source. There the figure rests on each country's own definition of what a city is, so the global comparison is blunter than the Swedish one. By 2024 the share had risen to just under 58%. That is billions of people who, over just over sixty years, have moved from field and village to city blocks and tower blocks, in countries where it has to happen in much less time than it took in Sweden.

Sweden became an urban society early. Now the rest of the world is making the same journey, on a much larger scale.

What makes this movement hard to handle is pace and size at the same time. A growing city needs more than new addresses. It needs roads, water pipes, electricity, schools and ways to get to work, all built at the same pace as people move in. Build too slowly and you get overcrowding and queues. Build the wrong way and you get cities without working water or public transport. It is that crane outside the window, repeated millions of times all over the world, at the same time.

In this area we go through five parts of that building work: the infrastructure that holds a city together, the construction industry that has to raise it, the technology that runs it with data, the automation that keeps it going, and the transport that moves through it.

Education, not advice.