Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
By 2011, “urban agglomerations”—whole metropolitan areas comprising an urban center and sur-
rounding areas—continued their explosive growth, especially in China, India, and other parts of Asia. Ac-
cording to the UN Population Division, the largest urban areas in the world were as follows:
Urban area
2011
2025
(UN projection)
Tokyo, Japan
37,217,000
38,661,000
Delhi, India
22,563,600
32,935,000
Mexico City
20,445,800
24,580,900
New York City metro area, U.S.
20,351,000
23,572,000
Shanghai, China
20,207,600
28,403,000
São Paulo, Brazil
19,924,500
23,174,700
Mumbai, India
19,743,600
26,556,900
Dhaka, Bangladesh
15,390,900
22,906,300
Kolkata, India
14,402,300
18,711,000
SOURCE
:
The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2013.
Founded by the Jesuits in 1554 São Paulo in Brazil passed the 20 million mark in 1988. The city, now
the most important manufacturing base in Latin America, grew rich on the coffee industry, which provided
the capital for the city's massive industrial growth. The promise of jobs in those factories has drawn mil-
lions of peasants from the surrounding countryside. An estimated 10 percent of the city's people now live
in its slums and squatter settlements, with water pollution and a rapidly rising infant mortality rate among
the major problems. The industrialization has also created an acid rain problem in the city, with acid levels
a thousand times that of normal water.
Also growing fast is Lagos, Nigeria. The capital city grew rapidly after oil revenues began drawing
hundreds of thousands of Nigerians to the city in hopes of finding a better life. They still come at a rate
of 200,000 each year, a population influx that is only worsening the city's unofficial distinction as being
possibly the world's worst city. Impossible overcrowding simply continues to worsen the problems of any
typical large city: pollution, poor sewage facilities, chronic water shortages, traffic, high unemployment,
poor housing, food shortages, and substandard medical treatment. During the 1980s, the worldwide drop
in oil prices only served to exacerbate the problem. Like Mexico City, Lagos is built on swampy, infilled
land. Drainage canals meant to take away some of the water that provides breeding grounds for mosqui-
toes and other disease-carrying insects have simply been filled in and built over. Since 1976, the Nigerian
government has been working on a plan to relocate the capital to Abuja, an inland city at the geographical
center of the country. Abuja became the capital in 1991 and Nigeria moved its official offices to the new
capital, but the shift—like the attempted shift of Brazil's capital from Rio de Janeiro to the new inland city
of Brasilia—has failed to weaken the pull of Lagos's magnetic attraction.
Can cities work in the future? That is a billion-dollar question. The world's richest cities, from New
York to Tokyo, face intractable problems that come from too many people crowded into too little space, all
creating garbage and sewage and requiring tremendous quantities of fresh food and water to be brought in.
There are interesting experiments in creating workable cities in a variety of places around the world. One
that is being viewed as a model for cities in developing nations is Curitiba, a commercial and industrial
center of the Brazilian state of Paraná. Although the population there has grown elevenfold in the past half
century to a little more than a million, it is leading the way in low-cost solutions to problems typical of
