PETALING JAYA: About 75% of Malaysia’s 32.44 million population live in urban areas, with the bumiputra remaining the majority in both urban and rural areas.
This is based on a census done two years ago, which found that the country had 24.4 million urban dwellers then.
The average urban household had about 3.9 persons, while rural households comprised an average of 4.2 persons. And there are more older folk in rural areas compared to urban centres.
“The rural population has reached ageing status with people aged 65 and over accounting for 7.3% (2010: 6.2%) as compared to 6.6% (2010: 4.6%) for urban population,” the census said.
This was revealed yesterday by the Department of Statistics Malaysia in a report on “Key Findings of Population and Housing Census of Malaysia 2020: Urban and Rural”.
Chief statistician Datuk Seri Dr Mohd Uzir Mahidin said Malaysia’s urbanisation rate had tripled over five decades from 28.4% in 1970 to 75% in 2020.
This is attributed to a rise in natural population, migration and demarcation.
Over these five decades, he said the urban population had expanded from three million to 24.4 million, while the rural population stood at 8.1 million in 2020 compared to 7.5 million in 1970.
“Six states had exceeded the 85% mark in urbanisation in 2020, compared to five states in 2010,” he said in a statement.
Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya recorded 100% of its population living in urban areas, followed by Selangor (95.8%), Penang (92.5%) and Melaka (90.9%).
On the other hand, Kelantan (44%), Pahang (52.8%) and Perlis (53.8%) have the lowest rates of urbanisation in 2020.
Labuan had the highest increase in terms of urbanisation rate, rising from 81.9% in 2010 to 88.9% in 2020.
Selangor had the largest urban population of 6.7 million (4.9 million in 2010), followed by Johor with 3.1 million (2.3 million in 2010) and Kuala Lumpur with two million (1.6 million in 2010), while Sabah has the highest rural population of 1.5 million.Elaborating on the urban population, the census found that the urban population in 2020 comprised 22.5 million Malaysians (92.4%) and 1.9 million (7.6%) non-citizens.
This was an increase compared to a decade earlier when there were 18 million Malaysians and 1.5 million foreigners living in urban areas.
According to the department, the composition of urban population comprised bumiputra (14 million people or 62.6%), Chinese (6.4 million or 28.6%) and Indians (1.8 million or 8.1%).
As for the rest of the urban folk, they were non-citizens (7.6%) and those categorised as “others”.
For comparison, there were 10.6 million bumiputra residing in cities (58.9%) in 2010, followed by 5.6 million Chinese (31.3%), 1.7 million Indians (9.2%) and 0.1 million others (0.7%).
The census also found that the percentage of rural population showed that the bumiputra were more dominant at 90.4%, followed by the Chinese (6.3%), Indians (2.4%) and others (0.9%).
There were 6.3 million (76.6%) urban households and 1.9 million (23.4%) rural households in 2020, up from 5.4 million urban households and 4.6 million rural households in 2010.
