The Hidden Burden of Morphological Deprivation in Small and Medium Cities

In growing cities, deprived neighborhoods house large numbers of residents, yet their extent and distribution remain poorly quantified, complicating implementation of SDG 11.1.1. We present the first global, neighborhood-scale spatial estimates of morphological deprivation, covering 5,132 cities in 103 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America & the Caribbean (LAC) home to 3.2 billion people. Neighborhood units and built-environment indicators from the City Segments v1 dataset were combined with segment-level labels from the eight-city IDEABench benchmark to train a supervised model, which was then applied to classify each segment as morphologically deprived or non-deprived. The mapped cities contained 1.96 billion residents, of whom 349 million (17.8%) lived in deprived segments, with the highest regional shares in Africa and substantial burdens in Asia and LAC. Morphologically deprived populations spanned the urban hierarchy, with about one-third living in small and medium cities, revealing important gaps in current deprivation monitoring.