Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
nature is still the dominant force. As the main threats have been averted and as restoration activities are
under way, the future of the park seems assured.
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Where Is the World's Most Populous City?
Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men.
The poet Milton liked cities. But two centuries later, his countryman, Lord Byron, disagreed:
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum of human cities torture.
Lord Byron may have been feeling claustrophobic back in 1812. How about you?
• Global population, which stood at 2.5 billion only forty years ago, hit 7 billion in March 2012,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
• Current projections are for global population to reach 10.5 billion by 2050.
• If Africa maintains its present 3 percent growth rate until this time next century, its current half
billion people will increase to 9.5 billion.
• Before 1850, only London and Paris had populations of more than 1 million. (Historical recon-
structions have produced estimated populations of more than 1 million for several ancient cit-
ies, however, all of these gradually declined. Before the Industrial Revolution, Rome, Xian in
China, Baghdad, Byzantium, and Edo—modern Tokyo—may have reached the 1 million mark
for a short period before suffering major population losses.) In the second half of the twentieth
century, more than two hundred forty cities reached the million mark, with most of them in de-
veloping countries.
The world's large cities, a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, are growing too fast for
their own good. Ancient Rome may have been the first city of a million people in the first century
AD.
But
after a few centuries of barbarians, wild and crazy emperors, and catastrophic epidemics, its population fell
to around twenty thousand. Rome didn't reach the million plateau again until 1930. Most of the world's
largest cities have grown up since the middle of the fifteenth century, the legacy of a phenomenal expan-
sion in European trade. Thousands of towns—most of them ports located on coasts or major rivers—were
developed as base cities for the growing network of global trade.
Following the great trading era, the next burst came during the Industrial Revolution, as cities in rapidly
industrializing Europe and North America sprang up around manufacturing and shipping centers. The de-
cline of many of these old “smokestack cities” during the past few decades has seen the rapid growth of
cities shift to other parts of the world.
World's Largest Cities
