Number of people living in the capital city
What you should know about this indicator
Indicates the total population living in the nation's capital city.
Related research and writing
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at
All data and visualizations on rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across .
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
The dataset was filtered to retain only the administrative capitals Cotonou (Benin), La Paz (Bolivia), St. Helier (Channel Islands), Abidjan (Cote d'Ivoire), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Pretoria (South Africa), and Colombo (Sri Lanka).
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by are completely open access under the . You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by , please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Number of people living in the capital city”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2024) - “Urbanization”. Data adapted from United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. Retrieved from /grapher/capital-city-population [online resource]How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018) – with minor processing by Full citation
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018) – with minor processing by . “Number of people living in the capital city” [dataset]. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “World Urbanization Prospects Dataset” [original data]. Retrieved April 28, 2025 from /grapher/capital-city-population