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?