The 2009 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects, prepared by the United Nations Population Division, provides a comprehensive and consistent set of urban and rural population data for the world's countries and areas, as well as for urban agglomerations with more than 750,000 inhabitants in 2009. The data referring to urban and rural areas cover the period 1950-2050 and those referring to urban agglomerations cover the period 1950-2025. Detailed results from the 2009 Revision are available for purchase in two sets of files, distributed on a single CD-ROM.

The files are prepared in Excel 2003, which is compatible with all versions since Excel 5.0/95. The CD-ROM version launches a navigation interface upon insertion that provides direct access to the files.

In the data sets, figures for 1950-2009 are estimates and those for years beyond 2009 are projections. To the exception of a selected set of annual indicators, estimates and projections are presented for years that are multiples of five. The urban, rural and city data presented are consistent with the medium variant of the 2008 Revision of World Population Prospects, the official United Nations population estimates and projections at the national level.

A detailed description of the CD-ROM can be found here.