Sunday, June 04, 2006

Largest Cities Through History

About.com has a neat chronological history of the world's largest cities, outlining the rapid growth of urban centers throughout history. A few milestones to look for is Baghdad being the first city to break the 1 million resident mark in the year 800 C.E, London being the first to jump over 5 million around 1900, and New York breaking 10 million less than 50 years later.

Of course, Tokyo reaching 23 million in 1975 is breathtaking and a bit unsettling at the same time, but what struck me as quite interesting is how it took over a millennium years to go from a maximum population of 1 million to 5 million, but then only takes 75 years to more than quadruple that amount of residents and break 20 million in Tokyo. Are our urban populations growing too quickly now?

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello, Prof.

I came acroos your home page and this blog. It's really fun to read and I like the works of your sister(I guess) very much.I'm glad you are doing great.

from Cho Kuwakado(remember me? London, Cornell)
(I thought I'd better tell you that the population of Tokyo is more like 13million, rather than 23million. About. guy is mistook the number I think. )

10/02/2006 11:14 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tokyo itself has a population of 8 million, but what counts is the urban area and thats about 35 million atm.

10/17/2006 11:56 AM  

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