urban areas in Sweden

An urban area or () in Sweden has a minimum of 200 inhabitants and may be a city, town or larger village. It is a purely statistical concept, not defined by any municipal or county boundaries. Larger urban areas synonymous with cities or towns ( sv, stad for both terms) for statistical purposes have a minimum of 10,000 inhabitants.. The same statistical definition is also used for urban areas in the other Nordic countries.

In 2018, there were nearly two thousand urban areas in Sweden, which were inhabited by 87% of the Swedish population.

''Urban area'' is a common English translation of the Swedish term . The official term in English used by Statistics Sweden is, however, " locality" ( sv, ort). It could be compared with "census-designated places" in the United States.

History

Until the beginning of the 20th century, only the towns/cities were regarded as urban areas. The built-up area and the municipal entity were normally almost congruent. Urbanization and industrialization created, however, many new settlements without formal city status. New suburbs grew up just outside city limits, being ''de facto'' urban but ''de jure'' rural. This created a statistical problem. The census of 1910 introduced the concept of "densely populated localities in the countryside". The term ''tätort'' (literally "dense place") was introduced in 1930. The municipal amalgamations placed more and more rural areas within city municipalities, which was the other side of the same problem. The administrative boundaries were in fact not suitable for defining rural and urban populations. From 1950 rural and urban areas had to be separated even within city limits, as, e.g., the huge wilderness around Kiruna had been declared a "city" in 1948. From 1965 only "non-administrative localities" are counted, independently of municipal and county borders. In 1971 "city" was abolished as a type of municipality.

Terminology

Urban areas in the meaning of ''tätort'' are defined independently on the division into counties and municipalities, and are defined solely according to population density. In practice, most references in Sweden are to municipalities, not specifically to towns or cities, which complicates international comparisons. Most municipalities contain many localities (up to 26 in Kristianstad Municipality), but some localities are, on the other hand, multimunicipal. Stockholm urban area is spread over 11 municipalities.

When comparing the population of different cities, the urban area (''tätort'') population is to prefer ahead of the population of the municipality. The population of, e.g., Stockholm should be accounted as about 1.2 million rather than the approximately 800,000 of the municipality, and Lund rather about 75,000 than about 110,000.

Swedish definitions

Terms used for statistical purposes

* ( en, urban area, or locality) is the central concept used in statistics. The definition is agreed upon in the Nordic countries: An urban area is any village, town or city with a population of at least 200, for which the contiguous built-up area meet the criterion that houses are not more than 200 meters apart when discounting rivers, parks, roads, etc. – without regard to the ward, municipal or county boundaries. Delimitation of localities are made by Statistics Sweden every three years starting 2015 on a trial basis, previously they were made every five years.
* ( en, smaller locality) is a rural locality with 50–199 inhabitants in a contiguous built-up area with no more than 150 meters between houses. The concept is rarely used outside the field of statistics, where it is used for settlements just below the limit defined for .
* ''Centralort'' ( en, central locality) is mostly used in the meaning municipal seat

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