Thursday, 17 February 2005By Irwin Arieff
UNITED NATIONS - Half the world's population will live in cities in two years, a huge jump from the 30
percent residing in urban areas in 1950, U.N. demographers have reported.
Some 3.2 billion of the world's 6.5 billion people live in cities today, and the number will climb to 5 billion -- an
estimated 61 percent of the global population -- by 2030, the U.N. Commission on Population and Development said
in a report on Wednesday.
The number of very large urban areas was also rising, the commission said. Twenty cities now have 10 million or
more inhabitants, compared with just four -- Tokyo, New York-Newark, Shanghai and Mexico City -- in 1975 and just
two -- New York-Newark and Tokyo -- in 1950.
The five biggest cities today in population are Tokyo, with 35.3 million people, Mexico City (19.2 million), New
York-Newark (18.5 million), Bombay (18.3 million) and Sao Paulo (18.3 million).
The next 15 largest are Delhi, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Shanghai, Dhaka, Los Angeles, Karachi, Rio de
Janeiro, Osaka-Kobe, Cairo, Lagos, Beijing, metropolitan Manila and Moscow.
By 2015, the five largest cities will be Tokyo, with 36.2 million residents, Bombay with 22.6 million, Delhi with 20.9
million, Mexico City with 20.6 million and Sao Paulo with 20 million, it said.
Despite the growing number of vast urban agglomerations, about half of all city dwellers live in far smaller urban
areas of fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, according to the report.
Urban residence patterns vary depending on an area's development status, the commission found. About
three-quarters of people in more developed regions lived in cities, while just 43 percent lived in them in less developed
areas, it said.
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Thursday, 17 February 2005
Reuters via Swissinfo
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