Brussels Is 2,200 Times More Crowded Than Northern Sweden

The widest spread in European statistics

Population density across EU regions runs from 7,827 inhabitants per square kilometre to 3.5. That is a ratio of roughly 2,200 to one, and it is by a wide margin the largest range this site has measured on any indicator.

The EU average is 109.7 per square kilometre.

Why this ranking is mostly about administrative boundaries

Brussels tops the list at 7,827, followed by Ciudad de Melilla at 6,180, Vienna at 5,094, Berlin at 4,343 and Hamburg.

Each of these is a city that constitutes a statistical region — a NUTS 2 region — on its own. Where a capital is its own region, its density is a city density. Where a capital sits inside a larger region — Madrid, Warsaw, Rome — that region includes surrounding countryside and the figure falls accordingly.

The ranking therefore reflects how each Member State drew its statistical regions at least as much as how its people are distributed. Comparing Brussels with a French or Polish region is comparing a city to a province.

That is a real limit on the indicator, and it is why the interesting comparison is at the other end.

The empty north

Övre Norrland in northern Sweden records 3.5 inhabitants per square kilometre, Guyane 3.6 and Mellersta Norrland 5.3. Pohjois- ja Itä-Suomi in Finland records 6.2.

These are large regions of forest, mountain and, in Guyane's case, rainforest. Övre Norrland alone covers roughly a fifth of Sweden's land area with about 2% of its population.

Unlike the top of the ranking, these figures are not artefacts of boundary drawing. Northern Sweden and Finland are genuinely among the least populated inhabited places in the world outside the Arctic and central Asia, and no plausible way of drawing regions would change that.

What density does to everything else

Density is not usually treated as an outcome in its own right, and it is a good predictor of several that are.

The emptiest regions on this list are the same regions where car dependency is highest, where public transport cannot be provided at reasonable cost, and where distance to health services is greatest. Sweden and Finland both record high car use per head, covered separately on this site, and their northern regions are the reason.

At the other end, the densest regions are where housing costs the most relative to income and where overcrowding is most common.

Reading the chart

The dots on the figure show rank order rather than proportion. A scale that placed 3.5 and 7,827 proportionally would compress every region except the top three into a single line at the left edge, which would communicate less than the numbers do.