Not ingame right now and not booting it up until I've actually done my household chores (so no screenshots - maybe later), but in my opinion there's a distinct lack of rural areas. Put simply, you've got cities, a few loose rural districts and some unimproved land.
This is because a combination of factors, including a few design decisions.
First, specialists are desirable for cities if you plan your adjacencies properly. This means that cities have their population largely stuffed into urban spaces, rather than on the rural outskirts of their territory.
Second, a city covers 37 tiles (including it's city center), of which 18, that's basically half, are the third ring out. A half-half distribution of rural and urban population (note: not counting the population you get every time you build a building, only tiles and specialists) will lead to rural areas being merely a thin, one tile wide strip around a city that's five tiles across - assuming a perfectly round city. On top of that, anywhere that your cities have overlap (and I do try to avoid having more overlap than necessary, but I also don't want to waste tiles that won't ever be improved and in fact won't even be claimed) will eat away those rural tiles.
Third, towns stop growing once they specialize. You'll usually want to grow to ten or so rural tiles plus a Granary and maybe a Fishing Quay and/or Gristmill for the food they provide to your cities, which means most towns are actually on the order of three urban tiles, four resources and just six non-resource rural tiles, which are then split between farms, woodcutters, mines, etc. Anything beyond that (more than half of the tiles in the three rings of the city) remains unimproved.
Fourth, as mentioned before, vegetated tiles become woodcutters, which simply don't give the same 'this place is in use' look that farms do.
Fifth, you'll want to claim rural tiles in order to expand your borders, but once you've got everything expanded into the third ring, the incentive to do this goes down, and an extra specialist is probably worth more than yet another third ring rural tile.
Another possible contributor is that there are quite a few buildings available - two to three each for food, production, culture, science, happiness and gold, and that might be selling it short. You're easily building 15 buildings even discounting uniques, which already requires 8 tiles (city hall included), and you're not always overbuilding everything (other tiles might be better), plus you might want to throw a wonder or two into the mix, and a resource tile surrounded by city doesn't quite look rural either, so that's quite simply a lot of tiles that have to be urban. Also, unlike in Civ VI you actually have the production to build all those buildings. I would personally like to see three buildings per tile instead of two, maybe only from Exploration onward, but I doubt such a change is possible with all the art involved. You'd also have to rebalance specialists but that's probably just numbers tweaking.
Alternatively, providing more population and giving cities four rings instead of three would work, but you'd need significantly bigger maps for that (we already feel like we're playing on cramped maps primarily because the previous expansion of city range didn't come with bigger maps). And of course it would necessitate rebalancing a lot of other stuff.
