Urban areas of Sweden

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

A tätort 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. Urban areas referred to as cities or towns (Swedish: stad) for statistical purposes have a minimum of 10,000 inhabitants. In 2010, there was 1,956 urban areas in Sweden, covering 85% of the Swedish population.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, only the 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 was of course 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.

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