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An urban area is a location characterized by high human population density and vast human-built features in comparison to the areas surrounding it. Urban areas may be cities, towns or conurbations, but the term is not commonly extended to rural settlements such as villages and hamlets. The world's urban population in 1950 of just 746 million has soared in the decades since. In 2009, the number of people living in urban areas (3.42 billion) surpassed the number living in rural areas (3.41 billion) and since then the world has become more urban than rural.〔http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/urbanization/urban-rural.shtml〕 This was the first time that the majority of the world's population lived in a city.〔http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/〕 In 2014 there were 7.25 billion people living on the planet, of which the global urban population comprised 3.9 billion. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs at that time predicted the urban population would grow to 6.4 billion by 2050, with 37% of that growth to come from three countries: China, India and Nigeria.〔 Urban areas are created and further developed by the process of urbanization. Measuring the extent of an urban area helps in analyzing population density and urban sprawl, and in determining urban and rural populations. Unlike an urban area, a metropolitan area includes not only the urban area, but also satellite cities plus intervening rural land that is socio-economically connected to the urban core city, typically by employment ties through commuting, with the urban core city being the primary labor market. ==Definitions== What is urban? Historian John Gurda writes: Official definitions vary somewhat between nations. European countries define urbanized areas on the basis of urban-type land use, not allowing any gaps of typically more than 200 m, and use satellite imagery instead of census blocks to determine the boundaries of the urban area. In less developed countries, in addition to land use and density requirements, a requirement that a large majority of the population, typically 75%, is not engaged in agriculture and/or fishing is sometimes used. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「urban area」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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