Urbanization in countries of the world: potential and dynamics for 1960–2022

The object of the study presented in the article was 215 countries of the world, the subject of the study was the dynamics of the urban population in 1960–2022. The study puts forward and partially confirms the hypothesis that development of settlements (countries) is subject to dialectical laws of development: from rural settlements to urban agglomerations and even to full-fledged city-states with 100 percent urban population (however, they still remain anomalous states). To test the hypothesis based on methods of mathematical, statistical and other types of analysis and modeling, we analyzed the dynamics of the percentage of urban population in 215 countries of the world for the period from 1960 to 2022 in order to identify global trends in the urbanization process and forecast until 2025. Also, during the study, tasks such as grouping countries of the world (by urbanization potential) and identifying critically low values of urbanization potential were set and solved. The grouping is based on the percentile method — countries with high urbanization potential (from the 100th to 51st percentile), countries with low potential (50th to 0th percentile). At the same time, leading countries (100–90th percentile) and outsider countries (10–0th percentile) were especially highlighted, and a critically low value of urbanization potential was determined, equal to the 10th percentile. In general, the study showed that, on average, the growth of urbanization in the countries of the world will continue and in 2025 will amount to 66% of the urban population in the world (an increase of almost 2 times since 1960), the limit (maximum potential) of urbanization will be 90–100% of the urban population (an increase of approximately 1.37 times) and critically low urbanization values will amount to about 30% of the world’s urban population (an increase of more than 3 times since 1960).

urban population, dialectics, dynamics, critically low values, urbanization potential, forecasting, Russia, statistical analysis, countries of the world