Megacities: the new frontiers
Nick Chiarelli
For the first the first time in human history, living in a city is the norm; more people live in cities than live in the countryside. The megacity is the very embodiment of the teeming metropolis, with all of the opportunities and challenges that such a situation can imply. It is estimated that around 394 million of the world's 6.5 billion (or around 6%) currently live in one of 29 megacities, with ten million-plus inhabitants (see Table 1).
Table 1: Top ten megacities
This paper gives a very brief overview of the historical development...