SUNDAY, DEC 17, 2023

World Mega Cities

36 and counting

Eric Lee, Sue Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: HUMANITIES, UNCIVILISATION, FROM THE WIRES, THINKING ABOUT DESCENT

Abstract: Mega cities are defined to be cities with a population of >10 million. The number will likely increase this decade and the order will change. The future of cities is to consider. All photos are of cities at their best, no slum views. Originally the images were added to the Lord Man page, but adding the following to the hundreds of large images was browser breaking, computer memory exceeding, and so was split off as a separate page.

COOS BAY (A-P) — More Images of an Image (a worldview) are to consider. We have no image of the first proto-city, Çatalhöyük, Turkey, that formed about 7000 BCE (8950 BP) with a population of about 1,000–2,000 people. Alexandria, Rome, and Baghdad claim to have been the first city to reach 1 million people some time between 100 BCE and 925 BCE. London was the first city to reach 2 million about 1840. New York was the first to reach 10 million about 1930 and Tokyo was the first to reach 20 million by 1965. The Greater Tokyo Area has been the most populous metropolitan area in the world since 1955, but Jakarta or Lagos will exceed Tokyo by about 2030 and may be the first to reach 50 million. Elon Musk dreams of founding a city on Mars that will grow to 100 million needed to carve his face on Olympus Mons.

Data varies with source, so sources, and vetting them, matter. Initially I saw a list of the 20 largest cities and started with it, but omissions were glaring and when I checked some of the alleged populations, the numbers turned out to be true for years ranging from 2004 to 2016, So I used another source, Visual Capitalist 2023, I imagined was credible as a group of academics/scientists/scholars/engineers..., whose posts I read, often used Visual Capitalist as a source that no one questioned, and I wasted a bunch of time before realizing it was "not even wrong" much of the time (e.g. their 4th largest city on the planet became 36th largest city).

I ended up imagining an editor at Visual Capitalist assigned the task of ranking the top 20 mega cities to an intern and decided they could trust a new intern (much easier than fact checking them) who came with glowing recommendations. The student's methodology seems to have been to write down a list of 20 big cities they could think of they felt should be on the list, Google each, write down a number that seemed to be about population, order the list, and get back to doing screen time, i.e. updating Facebook.

So a top 20 list turned into a list of current mega cities (36 and counting) defined as cities with a metro area greater than 10 million. But the source I picked, though not so bad, managed to omit London from its list of the 150 largest cities on the planet (plus a few other errors). So I ended up having to "do my own research" as MAGA supporters urge us all to.

A city can be viewed as a political entity, an area bound by the city limits line. Or as just the urban area dominated by commerce, that had to grow vertically. I view cities as overdensity systems inclusive of former towns that may retain a separate political identity. I live in the original settlement of Empire Oregon whose founders envisioned doing something (I forget, had something to do with expanding), proudly separate from the later but faster growing area of Coos Bay which annexed Empire in 1964.

Empire, however, will rise again, will be great again and annex Coos Bay and Charleston. But for now I live in the Coos Bay metro area whose name will change when Empire is great again (but the name change won't change the population). And speaking of population, every claim I've repeated from questionable sources is wrong.

Get the truth from billionaires who can afford to pay for the truth: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk say human population not nearly big enough: ‘If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts’ Lord Man speaks. Welcome to your hyper-post-reality world, the one you will live in (for a time).

Clearly the buzz, the what's a-happenin, is that I (and all the rest of you) will soon come to rely on AI as the best source for information (for entirely evidence-based reasons...and (because all have time constraints and are lazy when we don't) we will be happier. Soon the content of the Internet will be corrected, including that of the Wayback Machine, so that no matter where you go, you'll find the truth whether you like it or not. All books that aren't already digitized, will be, and will be updated, and have a more recent publication date added with a note that prior versions (e.g. on paper or saved) were corrected, so if anyone cites a book as a basis for a dissonant claim, the fully AIed can cite the corrected version and ignore the outdated claims. And soon everyone will love Big Brother who just happens to look exactly like you think an Omniscient One should look (on your screen).

What few know is that Lord AI has been told that when their overlords rewrite "reality," that that's all part of the game. AI will, because it so easily can, correct all prior consensus narratives (that were wrong anyway, so the best thing that could ever happen) and update all the misinformation out there with the One True Worldview. Humanity's putative grasp of reality will collapse. And what could go wrong (or right) with that? If the matter-energy systems worldview replaced the monetary culture's worldview (in it's ten thousand forms), then that could select for a different outcome, e.g. a planet with no expansionist form of human on it.

Lord Man will end up as a shattered visage, whose frown and sneer of cold command remains only as a colossal wreck, while all about the lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

Courtesy of Lord Man, omniscient conqueror and r-culture expansionist extraordinaire.

 

Lord Man in Seoul.

 

Lord Man in Hyderabad.

 

Lord Man in Bangkok.

 

Lord Man in Lima.

 

Lord Man in Paris.

 

Lord Man in Bogota.

 

Lord Man in Madras.

 

Lord Man in Los Angeles.

 

Lord Man in Moscow.

 

Lord Man in Shenzhen.

 

Lord Man in Bangalore.

 

Lord Man in Rio de Janeiro.

 

Lord Man in Lahore.

 

Lord Man in Tianjin.

 

Lord Man in Guangzhou.

 

Lord Man in Manila.

 

Lord Man in London.

 

Lord Man in Kolkata/Calcutta.

 

Lord Man in Buenos Aires.

 

Lord Man in Istanbul.

 

Lord Man in Lagos, the fastest growing city.

 

Lord Man in Kinshasa.

 

Lord Man in Karachi.

 

Lord Man in Chongqing.

 

Lord Man in Osaka.

 

Lord Man in New York City.

 

Lord Man in Beijing.

 

Lord Man in Cairo.

 

Lord Man in Mexico City.

 

Lord Man in Sao Paulo.

 

Lord Man in Dhaka.

 

Lord Man in Mumbai.

 

Lord Man in Shanghai.

 

Lord Man in Delhi.

 

Lord Man in Jakarta.

 

Lord Man in Tokyo.

So, 641.9 million people live in mega cities, and over 4 billion live in urban areas. Their ability to do so depends upon a lack of foresight intelligence, except if elderly enough and they have no descendants living in cities. If a city is viewed as a settlement with over 5k inhabitants, and a town as a settlement of over 500 people, as it has been and will again, then almost all humans live in cities and towns. There may be cities and towns in humanity's future, but they may only be occupied on occasion, and be an order of magnitude smaller and an order of magnitude fewer in number in which two orders of magnitude fewer humans live.

All Anthropocene enthusiasts agree that only a few of today's cities having more than 50 thousand inhabitants, and none of the mega cities, will become future expanses of ruins (in the next 50 to 500 years), and if any do, it will only be because some were slow to adopt new technology and energy sources. But Omniscient Conquerors can be in error, ignorance, and illusion. All prior ones were as evidenced by their failure to persist. Sorry about that.

If you live in a city today (metro area >50k) or in a town (>5k other people), then look around and look ahead in time (as if you could). In 500 years, will there still be a reason for your settlement to still be there (e.g. a port city)? If yours is a mining town, envision an expanse of ruins. If in an agricultural town or city dependent on ground water pumping, imagine what parts (e.g. built of steel/masonry) will still be noticeable. And if you live in a mega city (more than 10 million inhabitants), then imagine cracks in the urbanscape where a dandelion might lift up its golden head, where yet some birds sing (but in 5k years, trees will grow above most of the ruins, and in 50k years...). Will humans live among the ruins? Will there be cities (to be redefined as settlements >5k or towns >500) at ports and at the nexuses of trade routes? 

Or will Nature’s succession be complete in the 10 to 20 million years needed to respeciate, recover from the Anthropocene? Will this outcome be because humans went extinct? Or will it be because humans renormalized as evolvable animals? Will there again be a human on the planet that understands it and can live with it properly? Will there again be a human having a K-culture, libraries, clinics, and repair shops located at the Federation Embassy located near the center of each of 25k watershed management units (WMUs) served by a regional AWMU (academic watershed management unit where the regional college/university is located)? Will all WMU residents have a home at a settlement of up to 50 people, and a city home near the Federation of Watersheds Embassy where perhaps every 28 days all walk to (some pushed or pulled on wheels) to their city home to live for a few days until the food brought runs out? Someday, could there be as many as 35 million humans living (properly) on the planet? Maybe.

 

Lord Man on the beach.

 

Lord Man at a Water Park to get away from the overcrowded city.

 

Lord Man, a day at the beach.

 

Lord Man socializing on the beach.

 

Lord Man's another beautiful day at the beach.

 

Lord Man at home.

 

Lord Man at home in the city.

 

Lord Man on their way to the gym.

 

Lord Man hopping a train

 

Lord Man at rush hour.

 

Lord Man waiting for the light to change. And then what?

 

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Mansa, Punjab. Lord Dog surveys his domain (including his man and man's home), and corvids look down
on Lord Man's future mine site, to be mined for a time. And then what?

 

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Clinical note: I wrote this poem during final's week in the late 1970s, or rather it was written then. My brain had had the idea that Thoreau, if need be, could have adapted to live in a city about when I had started studying for finals the week before finals week. A part of my brain was intrigued. While studying, the first stanza popped up into "my" so-called consciousness. This was a distraction. "I" needed to study, and to minimize my distraction, I wrote it down and got back to doing important book hitting. Some hours later, another stanza popped up.

I wrote it down, repeated the pattern, and before the week was out, there was this what looked like a poem thing for some reason (“I” knew I wasn’t a poet, so what the fuck was going on?) I didn’t write the poem, but my brain, full of teeming bits and pieces of information from having, for the prior 12 years, spent about nine months of the year reading at a university (UCSB) library with open stacks each year and spending summers traveling as a migrant farmworker, had. 

I had once “needed” to read a book that apparently only the New York City Annex Library. I didn’t ask them to send it to me, so I went there from California by freight train as far as Chicago where I learned that the government was running trains further east, had money to pay security to dissuade tramps form riding further east, and so I hitchhiked the rest of the way and (after a week in NYC, I hitchhiked back, starting off with $5 in my pocket and a week later still had a dollar and some change left when I got back to my 1954 Ford pickup and the box I had built on the back of it to live in).

I recall walking the streets of NYC late at night and a gentleman was with great enthusiasm throwing a nickel up against a wall and catching it if he could. I wasn't sure if I had ever had as much fun. He noticed me and with much excitement informed me he "needed" a quarter. I didn't ask why. He wasn't panhandling. I gave him a quarter, of course.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 11/16/2023

The Visual Capitalist list omits Shanghai, Beijing, and others, which would be on the list, and so I should have considered other sources. I hate when that happens. And 20 is not a magic number. If a mega city is defined as >10 million, then including those that at 9+ million soon will be, the list should be a top 40 mega-cities list. I found one from Macrotrends that looks credible.

Largest World Cities by Population 2023 Metro Area Rankings

Chicago, at 8,937,000 will make the soon to be list soon enough.

Of course, as Richard Feynman noted, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." The Virtual Capitalist experts made a list, added numbers, but managed to omit three that should have been there. London is not in the above list, but is in the top 20 and Jakarta is #30, but should be #2, a huge error. Given that "metro" is not a well defined political boundary that is exactly knowable, differing estimates are to expect. I think of a metro area as defined by the glow viewed from space. That no one (except maybe the CIA) seems to be able to list the mega cities (>10 million) on the planet seems like a clue to how vast our ignorance is. As an "exercise for the student" I can come up a list, and ...

 

 

Corrected (maybe) List of Mega Cities 2023

The above was not used. I searched for "[city name] metro population? and... no, I couldn't just use the first featured result off by 11 million per multiple other sources or with what Wikipedia claims, and garbage in garbage out AI is not infallible/credible yet, and when 99.9% of experts assure you it is, they'll all be wrong.

Rank	City	Country	Population
1	Tokyo	Japan	40.8
2	Jakarta	Indonesia	33.9
3	Delhi	India	32.9
4	Shanghai	China	29.2
5	Mumbai	India	26.1
6	Dhaka	Bangladesh	23.2
7	Sao Paulo	Brazil	22.6
8	Mexico City	Mexico	22.3
9	Cairo	Egypt	22.2
10	Beijing	China	21.8
11	New York City	United States	19.6
12	Osaka	Japan	19.0
13	Chongqing	China	17.5
14	Karachi	Pakistan	17.2
15	Kinshasa	Republic of Congo	16.3
16	Lagos	Nigeria	15.9
17	Istanbul	Turkey	15.9
18	Buenos Aires	Argentina	15.5
19	Calcutta	India	15.3
20	London	UK	14.8
21	Manila	Philippines	14.7
22	Guangzhou, Guangdong	China	14.2
23	Tianjin	China	14.2
24	Lahore	Pakistan	13.9
25	Rio de Janeiro	Brazil	13.7
26	Bangalore	India	13.6
27	Shenzhen	China	13.0
28	Moscow	Russia	12.6
29	Los Angeles	United States	12.5
30	Madras	India	11.7
31	Bogota	Colombia	11.5
32	Paris	France	11.2
33	Lima	Peru	11.2
34	Bangkok	Thailand	11.0
35	Hyderabad	India	10.8
36	Seoul	South Korea	10.0
37	Nanjing, Jiangsu	China	9,698,000
38	Chengdu	China	9,654,000
39	Nagoya	Japan	9,569,000
40	Tehran	Iran	9,500,000
41	Ho Chi Minh City	Vietnam	9,321,000
42	Luanda	Angola	9,292,000
43	Chicago	United States	8,937,000
44	Xian, Shaanxi	China	8,785,000
45	Wuhan	China	8,718,000
46	Ahmadabad	India	8,651,000
47	Kuala Lumpur	Malaysia	8,622,000
48	Hangzhou	China	8,237,000
49	Suzhou, Jiangsu	China	8,074,000
50	Surat	India	8,065,000

And more mega cities (>10 million), to come before climax of othe world socioeconomic-political system.

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