^wonderful site, however the census was in 2021, taken midway through a national lockdown, which it posts about right at the start. Still interesting to see though -frontline workers were allowed to commute.
IDK if mentioned but I heard Delhi is on track to be the worlds largest city, at least in terms of population. Delhi over in India.
Unlike places like Tokyo or even Shanghai, Delhi doesn't have how we say the most optimal traffic and mass transit situation going on there. Will be super crowded with terrible traffic and overcrowded trains (moreso than now).
One has to wonder about the pollution situation but... issue for another day I suppose.
Delhi actually has one of the world's largest metro systems, and fast expanding. It'll overtake London and NYC's ones in the next few months, as the first major part of the Phase IV expansion gets completed.
But yeah, another mahoosive city, and likely to squeeze past Jakarta soon
And oil consumption is increasing. With the heat, agricultural runoff and burning, straining of resources (trash collection, electrical, water, e.g.), have to wonder about how they will tackle all of these big city problems.
On a side note, with some of those pics, that divide between the classes, poor vs middle/upper middle class... the divide is real. Here I was thinking some U.S. cities had a dramatic transition from poor to rich, sometimes via a few blocks but there the line is drawn!
In a way with Chinese cities, the master planning I think greatly helped. Yes they jammed a lot of folks in the city states or prefectures... but there was a degree of planning versus some of these Indian or even Nigeria locations where its just a mass of people moving from rural to urban areas, with lackluster planning it seems.
I don't see any of these rankings as important in the long run. Tokyo at least has superior planning and conditions. And isn't super polluted.
No sense is having the goal of most people if its a disaster to live in.
Well there is hope yet. Tokyo in the 60s -when it became the world's largest - was one of the most haphazard, unplanned and industrial cities.
The centre was modern -ugly but exciting. In Time's book on Japan the author could only comment on the widespread ugliness of the city, having rebuilt itself twice from the greatest urban destructions in history (1923 earthquake and 1945 bombing). However the life and culture shone through:
^Tokyo was also still recovering from getting the hell bombed out of it during WW2.
Tokyo was destroyed long before the 1923 Kanto earthquake anyway.
As is typical in Asia, they had no appreciation for heritage and traditional buildings, so with the Meiji Revolution they demolished the old Tokyo, which was a wonder to behold.
The air pollution in Delhi is currently so bad it shrinks life expectancy by around 10 years! (report on NPR from their Indian correspondents)
India and other South Asian countries seem to be far behind the progress that China has made in this regard.
Those IQ Air rankings are so strange. I went to the site to see the full list and not only were there many surprises, there were several cities listed twice with two different rankings.
New York, Santiago, Kobe and Singapore were all there twice and those were just the ones I noticed.
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Erm the Meiji Restoration did not 'destroy' old Edo. They definitely built new buildings, as every decade does, but the reason the city largely burned down in the earthquake was the thousands of traditional homes. The quake hit during lunch time, and because the city was mostly made of wood, the overturned cooking quickly started hundreds of thousands of fires.
1920's pre-quake:
After the quake you can see the difference between what was once wood (utterly gone, only the roof tiles remain), and what was brick/ stone which survived as ruins:
Btw, the main one, Edo-Jo, the world's largest ever castle was kept -it was largely destroyed in three phases. A city wide fire in 1657, again in 1873, and finally WWII bombing in 1945.
Before the 1657 Mereiki Fire, that killed 100,000:
Meiji era -most of the city was still traditional buildings too:
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Quote:
Originally Posted by muppet
Well there is hope yet. Tokyo in the 60s -when it became the world's largest - was one of the most haphazard, unplanned and industrial cities.
The centre was modern -ugly but exciting. In Time's book on Japan the author could only comment on the widespread ugliness of the city, having rebuilt itself twice from the greatest urban destructions in history (1923 earthquake and 1945 bombing). However the life and culture shone through:
If you've ever had an urge to see what art deco Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake looked like, play the game SMT: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army - or watch someone else play it on Youtube. It's set in Tokyo in the 1920's, to the point that characters travel around the city on streetcars that follow actual 1920s streetcar lines, and charge actual 1920s fares.
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The vaaaast majority of housing in Tokyo (and all other Japanese cities) prior to WWII was washiki-style machiya: timber-framed, paper-walled, tile-roofed row houses that perpetually burned down every ~20 years due to fires. Mostly started by earthquakes. Urban "resets" have been normal for hundreds of years here. While Western cities had switched to stone, brick, and masonry for their 19th century rows, Japanese cities were still using kigumi no-nail woodwork rows.
More machiya were built during the Meiji Restoration than during any other time in Japanese history.
Most Japanese cities don't have intact machiya districts because of US firebombing during WWII, followed by strictly-enforced updated housing codes immediately after the war during the GHQ era which prohibited traditional machiya reconstruction. In their place, we got a bunch of corrugated metal shacks, which themselves have now become nostalgic touchstones of Shitamachi-style 50s and early 60s vernacular aesthetics.
Certain places still have machiya districts, mainly Kyoto and Kanazawa, because the US specifically chose not to firebomb these cities for cultural and post-war strategic reasons.
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