Urban areas in Sweden facts for kids

An urban area in Sweden is called a tätort. This Swedish word means "dense locality." It's a place where at least 200 people live close together. A tätort can be a city, a town, or a big village. It's a way to count people for statistics, not based on city or county borders.

In 2018, Sweden had almost 2,000 urban areas. About 87% of all Swedish people lived in these areas. The official English term used by Statistics Sweden for tätort is "locality." You can compare them to "census-designated places" in the United States.

How Urban Areas in Sweden Started

For a long time, only official towns and cities were seen as urban areas in Sweden. But as more people moved to cities and industries grew, new settlements appeared. These new areas were like cities but were still officially considered countryside. This made it hard to count people correctly.

In 1910, a new idea was introduced: "densely populated localities in the countryside." Then, in 1930, the term tätort was created. This helped statisticians count people in these growing areas, no matter if they were officially a city or not.

Later, in 1965, Sweden started counting only "non-administrative localities." This meant they looked at how people lived, not at old city or county lines. In 1971, "city" was even removed as a type of municipality. This made it clearer to define urban areas based on how many people lived there and how close their homes were.

Understanding Swedish Urban Areas

Map of Sweden showing urban areas with more than 20,000 people.

Urban areas, or tätorter, are defined by how many people live there and how close their homes are. They don't follow county or municipality lines. This can sometimes make it tricky to compare Swedish cities with cities in other countries.

Most municipalities in Sweden have many tätorter inside them. For example, Kristianstad Municipality has 26! On the other hand, some very large tätorter can spread across several municipalities. The Stockholm urban area, for instance, covers 11 different municipalities.

When people talk about the population of a city like Stockholm, it's usually better to look at the tätort population. The Stockholm tätort has about 1.6 million people. This is much more than the 990,000 people who live only within the Stockholm municipality's official borders.

Swedish Terms for Places

Official Terms for Statistics

• Tätort (or urban area): This is the main term used in statistics. It means a village, town, or city with at least 200 people. The homes must be no more than 200 meters apart, not counting things like rivers or parks. These areas are defined by Statistics Sweden every three years.
• Småort (or smaller locality): This is a rural area with 50 to 199 people. The houses are usually no more than 150 meters apart. This term is mostly used by statisticians for places just below the tätort size.
• Centralort (or central locality): This term usually means the main town or center of a municipality. It's where you find important services, shops, and government offices for that area.

Common and Older Terms

• Storstad (or metropolitan area): This term means "large city." It's usually used for Sweden's three biggest cities: Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. Statistics Sweden uses "metropolitan area" for these cities and the areas around them.
• Stad (or town/city): This word roughly means an urban area with more than 10,000 people. Since 1971, "city" is no longer an official type of municipality in Sweden. But people still use stad to talk about places that used to be official cities.
• By (or village/hamlet): This is a traditional word for a small settlement. Sometimes, people use it casually to mean a suburb or even a town, but it generally refers to a very small place, even smaller than a småort.

Facts and Figures

Statistics Sweden updates the definitions of urban areas regularly. Before 2015, they did this every five years. Now, they are trying a three-year update period.

In 2010, the number of urban areas in Sweden grew to 1,956. A total of 8,016,000 people, which is 85% of Sweden's population, lived in these urban areas. These areas take up only about 1.3% of Sweden's total land. The largest urban area is Stockholm, with about 1.4 million people.

See also

In Spanish: Zonas urbanas en Suecia para niños