SOCIETY

The Urban Majority

2007 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Sometime around 2007, statistically and silently, humanity crossed a line nine thousand years in the making: more people lived in cities than outside them. The urban transition that began at Çatalhöyük is completing within a single lifetime, with billions more city dwellers expected by mid-century, mostly in Africa and Asia; satellites mapping settlement and light suggest the truly rural are already a small minority.

Why it matters

Homo sapiens is now an urban species, a change of habitat as profound as leaving the trees: cities concentrate the economy, the emissions, the innovation and the vulnerabilities of everything else on this timeline's recent end. Whether the century's defining structures, climate, inequality, epidemics, bend toward catastrophe or resilience will be decided mostly in cities being built right now. The frise begins in a savanna and ends in a street.

Dating & uncertainty

Around 2007, by United Nations accounting, the world's population became more urban than rural for the first time; satellite-based measures of settlements, which count towns and dense suburbs differently, put the urban share far higher still. Cities now generate about 80 percent of the world's economy and more than 70 percent of energy-related emissions.

Sources

1. Seto et al. (2017), PNAS · Sustainability in an urbanizing planetdoi:10.1073/pnas.1606037114
2. Melchiorri et al. (2018), Remote Sensing · Unveiling 25 years of planetary urbanization with remote sensing: perspectives from the Global Human Settlement Layerdoi:10.3390/rs10050768
3. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs · World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision. Institutional source: UN DESA publications, accessed 2026-08-30.

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:545.2 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day