By Bosphorus News Economy Desk
Nearly two-thirds of Türkiye's population lives in densely populated cities under a United Nations measure designed to make settlement patterns comparable across countries. The 2025 figure of 64.3% exceeds the corresponding shares in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
The data come from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs' World Urbanization Prospects 2025, which applies the Degree of Urbanization methodology using common population-density and settlement-size thresholds rather than relying only on national administrative definitions.
Türkiye's population is divided under the measure into 64.3% living in cities, 18.5% in towns and 17.2% in rural areas.
A city is identified through contiguous high-density grid cells with at least 1,500 residents per square kilometer and a combined population of at least 50,000. The methodology allows countries with different municipal structures and domestic definitions of urban areas to be compared on the same basis.
The United Kingdom records a 58% city share under the same measure, while Belarus stands at 55.6% and Spain at 51.6%. Greece records 45.6%.
Germany, France and Italy are all below 35%, with Germany and Italy at 34.5% and France at 34.4%.
Those figures should not be read as a conventional ranking of national urbanization rates. The UN measure captures how much of a country's population lives inside large, densely settled urban centres, while people living in smaller or less densely built-up settlements are classified separately as residents of towns.
The comparison also does not amount to an official UN ranking of 37 European countries. Türkiye is classified by the UN under Western Asia, and the widely circulated 37-country comparison is constructed from the underlying UN dataset rather than published as a standalone UN league table.
The broader European aggregate stands at 40.4% of the population living in cities, 32.6% in towns and 27% in rural areas.
Türkiye's 64.3% therefore points to an unusually high concentration of population in dense urban centres compared with many major European economies. The pattern is consistent with the country's large population clusters around Istanbul and the Marmara region, Ankara, İzmir and other major urban areas.
The UN dataset does not measure housing pressure, transport capacity or earthquake exposure. It does, however, provide a common demographic baseline for examining how heavily Türkiye's population is concentrated in dense settlements.
That concentration is projected to increase only gradually. The UN expects the share of Türkiye's population living in cities to reach 65.9% by 2050, while the rural share falls from 17.2% to 15.3%.
The figures show why conventional urbanization statistics and density-based measures can produce different pictures of the same country. Under the UN's common spatial criteria, Türkiye already has close to two-thirds of its population living inside high-density cities.
Sources: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects 2025, Bosphorus News review and reporting.