The world's biggest cities from above. Image: Getty.
comparing apples with trucks. What you really need is a single source that follows a single set of rules: the results may not be perfect, but at least they'll be consistent.
That’s where Demographia comes in. The St. Louis-based consultancy was founded by the urban planner Wendell Cox (who, unusually for someone in that line of work, likes to write articles for conservative publications about the benefits of private car ownership). It also has a website that is, with the best will in the world, not massively easy on the eye.
But every year Demographia publishes something rather good: the World Urban Areas Report, a sort of bumper book of city population stats. You can check out the 11th edition here.
Here’s how it defines a city:
An urban area ("built-up urban area," urbanized area or urban
agglomeration) is a continuously built up land mass of urban development
that is within a labor market (metropolitan area or metropolitan
region). An urban area contains no rural land... [It] is best thought of
as the “urban footprint” – the lighted area that can be observed from
an airplane (or satellite) on a clear night.
This year's edition of the World Urban Areas Report covers more than a
thousand of the largest cities in the world, from Tokyo (pop.
37,000,000), right down to tiddlers like 850th-ranked Leicester (Pop.
534,000): all 1,009 cities, in fact, with a population of half a million
of more.Here are the top 10. See if you can spot any pattern.
Okay, here's the same chart again. This time, we’ve coloured the cities by continent.
Asia's dominance continues as you move down the league tables, too. Here's the top 20:
There are two other striking things about these league tables.
China rules
The first is the dominance of China, which takes 12 places in the top 50, and 22 of the top 100.Again, this shouldn't be surprising – it's the world's most populous country, home to nearly a fifth of humanity – but nonetheless, it's striking how many of these megacities you almost certainly haven't heard of.
0 comments:
Post a Comment