Indonesia’s Jakarta now the world’s largest city, Tokyo falls to third: UN

[Gresto]

Originally Posted by montréaliste

Well, in the case of Jakarta, it literally is a sinking ship.

Not literally, but figuratively.

[montréaliste]

Originally Posted by Gresto

Not literally, but figuratively.

Well, it’s actually sinking dramatically. There are apparently only a million households with running water, and therefore, a ton of illegal wells that provoke a settling of the clay underneath the surface. The weight of infrastructure and sponging of the aquifer accelerates a more or less normal process.

[Nite]

Originally Posted by BnaBreaker

Yeah, being the world's largest city is absolutely nothing to brag about if said city doesn't have the ability to provide the majority of people living there with at least a basic standard of living. Tokyo can provide that. Jakarta and Dhaka can't. Jakarta has a chance to, but despite the leaps in quality of life Bangladesh as a whole has made over the past several decades, I don't think Dhaka will ever be capable of that, and that is of course to say nothing of the massive climate change risks it faces.

What Can Tokyo provide that Jakarta or Dhaka can't?

[MolsonExport]

Next, Lagos and Kinshasha will be among the 5 largest cities in the world in a few decades.

[MolsonExport]

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

I would have thought at least London and/or Paris would still rank in the top 20 cities today. I know this is a projection and projections so far into the future are next to worthless, but it's interesting that if we continue on this trajectory there will be no top 20 cities in the Americas in 75 years despite our having 6 of the top 20 today.

[MolsonExport]

at one time, nearly all the largest cities were in Europe or in the Western Hemisphere.

[BnaBreaker]

Originally Posted by Nite

What Can Tokyo provide that Jakarta or Dhaka can't?

Well... indoor plumbing, electricity, reliable transit, and ground that won't be a part of the ocean in fifty years for a start...

[Nite]

Originally Posted by BnaBreaker

Well... indoor plumbing, electricity, reliable transit, and ground that won't be a part of the ocean in fifty years for a start...

You really think Jakarta or Dhaka don't have indoor plumbing, electricity, and transit???

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

at one time, nearly all the largest cities were in Europe or in the Western Hemisphere.

Hard to imagine nowadays that some of those like Manchester, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Berlin used to be among the largest cities in the world.

[BnaBreaker]

Originally Posted by Nite

You really think Jakarta or Dhaka don't have indoor plumbing, electricity, and transit???

Of course they do... that should go without saying in the year 2025. But as I said, unlike Tokyo neither Dhaka nor, to a lesser extent, Jakarta, have the ability or the financial means to make those services reliably available to a sizable chunk of their populace currently, nevermind a climate crisis and ten million more future residents. So I'm not sure those two vaulting to the top of the largest cities list is really something to be celebrated.

[bartolo]

Originally Posted by BnaBreaker

Of course they do... that should go without saying in the year 2025. But as I said, unlike Tokyo neither Dhaka nor, to a lesser extent, Jakarta, have the ability or the financial means to make those services reliably available to a sizable chunk of their populace currently, nevermind a clmate crisis and ten million more future residents. So I'm not sure those two vaulting to the top of the largest cities list is really something to be celebrated.

On the transit front, much of that is provided by minibus and not a government run or regulated system.

[DFW]

To be more precise it’s the Jakarta Special Capital Region only, not the city proper. The city proper has 10.5 million.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I would have thought at least London and/or Paris would still rank in the top 20 cities today.

That's because their new definition of urban areas is essentially BS. They come up with this new definition and suddenly Paris has less than 10 million people and is not a megacity anymore. In the world of statistics, when a definition (however perfect it seems on paper) leads to slightly crazy results in practice, the first thing the statistician should do is ask oneself some questions about the validity of that definition.

In any case, urban areas have long stopped being relevant to measure the real extent of cities, at least since the mass use of cars in the western world, with lots of people now living in totally detached communities part of the commuter belt but still nonetheless part of the wider metropolis in every sense. This is less of a concern in Third World countries where people are too poor to have cars and live in commuter belts, but it makes a big difference in developed countries. That's why we've created the concept of "metropolitan area".

For a long time, there was no standard definition of what a metro area was, each country had their own definitions, which made comparisons difficult, but the OECD has now come with a standard international definition of metro areas, the so-called "Functional Urban Area" (basically a dense core + all contiguous areas around it where more than 15% of the working population commute to the core area).

Unfortunately they make the calculations only for the cities in the OECD countries, but here are the largest metro areas in those countries as per the OECD (as of 2020, last year for which we have data for all cities):
- Tokyo: 36,680,575
- Seoul: 24,078,693
- Mexico City: 20,535,317
- New York: 19,827,708
- Los Angeles: 17,812,851
- Osaka: 16,840,050
- Istanbul: 13,858,705
- Paris: 13,125,142
- London: 12,451,423
- Chicago: 9,424,738

[Yuri]

People bashed both Jakarta and Dhaka, but they're in completely levels of development. A quick read on Wikipedia show how Jakarta is miles ahead in terms of infrastructure and economy. Jakarta, however, still lags behind the biggest Latin American metropolises though.

And about UN list is completely incoherent: some cities are oversized other undersized. They can't keep any consistency across the board. I don't understand why is so hard! Dozens of forumers here could put together a much better list.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

That's because their new definition of urban areas is essentially BS. They come up with this new definition and suddenly Paris has less than 10 million people and is not a megacity anymore. In the world of statistics, when a definition (however perfect it seems on paper) leads to slightly crazy results in practice, the first thing the statistician should do is ask oneself some questions about the validity of that definition.

In any case, urban areas have long stopped being relevant to measure the real extent of cities, at least since the mass use of cars in the western world, with lots of people now living in totally detached communities part of the commuter belt but still nonetheless part of the wider metropolis in every sense. This is less of a concern in Third World countries where people are too poor to have cars and live in commuter belts, but it makes a big difference in developed countries. That's why we've created the concept of "metropolitan area".

For a long time, there was no standard definition of what a metro area was, each country had their own definitions, which made comparisons difficult, but the OECD has now come with a standard international definition of metro areas, the so-called "Functional Urban Area" (basically a dense core + all contiguous areas around it where more than 15% of the working population commute to the core area).

Unfortunately they make the calculations only for the cities in the OECD countries, but here are the largest metro areas in those countries as per the OECD (as of 2020, last year for which we have data for all cities):
- Tokyo: 36,680,575
- Seoul: 24,078,693
- Mexico City: 20,535,317
- New York: 19,827,708
- Los Angeles: 17,812,851
- Osaka: 16,840,050
- Istanbul: 13,858,705
- Paris: 13,125,142
- London: 12,451,423
- Chicago: 9,424,738

I think even by those numbers London and Paris would be knocked out of the top 20. Off the top of my head, Beijing, Shanghai, São Paulo, Mumbai, Delhi, Shenzen, Moscow, Lagos... are going to almost certainly have larger populations than the bottom 4 on this list. There are at least a half a dozen maybes like Karachi, Lahore, Rio de Janeiro, that could also edge out Paris, London or both.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Hard to imagine nowadays that some of those like Manchester, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Berlin used to be among the largest cities in the world.

That list is incorrect anyway, as is often the case with those lists. For example for Paris they give the population only within the city limits, as if the suburbs didn't exist, but for London they give the population within Greater London (which didn't even exist back then), a territory vastly larger than the County of London (which was the "municipal" territory of London back then).

Real figures for 1900 are the following, if we compare like and like, for a few European cities:
Greater London (1,572 km²): 6,439,500
Paris (1,572 km²): 4,009,400
Berlin (1,572 km²): 2,805,800
Madrid (1,572 km²): 602,400
Rome (1,572 km²): 461,350

For New York, the figure in 1900 was somewhere between 3,448,500 (within 784 km²) and 4,207,900 (within 1,683 km²).

[New Brisavoine]

For comparison, at the start of WW2 (all European cities within 1,572 km²):
- Greater London: 8.61 million
- Paris: 6.02 million
- Berlin: 4.66 million
- Rome: 1.37 million
- Madrid: 1.35 million

For New York, somewhere between 7.45 million (within 784 km²) and 9.18 million (within 1,683 km²).

[Yuri]

There are 14 million in London urban area (4,769 km²). That's a third the size of Ilê-de-France which contains 12.5 million people.

A London metropolitan area would range between 14-17 million depending on the definition. The most strict one must start at 14 million.

[New Brisavoine]

On the one hand Yuri, on the other hand a reputed international organization like the OECD which has worked with statisticians and urban scientists/geographers for years to develop a harmonized definition of metro areas. Which am I gonna choose?