They should have included Omaha, so people could compare it to something everyone knows.
I would have thought more cities in China would be at the top of the list by the end.
Tokyo has had a good run, but demographics mean that it'll be overtaken pretty soon. The metropolitan government reckons that its population will halve by 2100.
I feel pretty confident the various annexations that most megalopoles engage in have been smoothed out - for example, there's no sudden bump for New York in 1898 when it annexed the around 300k Brooklyn, so likely that's been averaged out to look like annual growth within some period like 1890-1900.
3: Pittsburgh lost half its people. Made for some infrastructure problems, but really cheap houses.
I just landed in Taipei, which seemed pretty big, but having sat down and ordered a walnut lentil burger with satay sauce and a beer, it's possible that I've just discovered some new part of California.
4: Right, New York's stated population has to be based on some pragmatic assessment of where the real edges of the city are -- the numbers are way off for the population inside the formal political boundaries of the city.
Made for some infrastructure problems, but really cheap houses.
Yep. You can even pick up an old house in Japan for free, if you know where to look.
2: China works quite hard to keep it that way.
Not in metropolitan Tokyo, of course. (The figures in the OP graph are for the Greater Tokyo area, which is about the size of Wales and includes a lot of empty mountainous areas, like Okutama).
It was! Also this place (which seems to have a loose New Zealand theme) is exclusively playing small-label 80s British rock.
What's the place? I plan to got to Taiwan sometime maybe next year.
KGB = "kiwi gourmet burgers." Lucky find, needing someplace veggie-plausible that was open late. Any occasion for you going to Taiwan, other than breadth of experience?
Does Arby's even do burgers? Tucson was full of them but my child self wasn't okay with the roast beef sandwich.
I haven't been to Asia ever, but I spent three days in Tuscon once. I don't recall any a Arby's.
Super cool, lots of things I didn't know: that Buenos Aires was ever that large. that Beijing and Shanghai have such different histories, that Vijayanagara existed, that Istanbul's population grew rapidly during 1500-1600 (is this just recovering from a previous decrease?). I'm a little confused about what a city means and why Seoul isn't on the list.
Super cool, lots of things I didn't know: that Buenos Aires was ever that large. that Beijing and Shanghai have such different histories, that Vijayanagara existed, that Istanbul's population grew rapidly during 1500-1600 (is this just recovering from a previous decrease?). I'm a little confused about what a city means and why Seoul isn't on the list.
Taiwan seems to be the closest thing to enlightened topless Asia. It's about to have full recognized same-sex marriage!
Also, they invented soup dumplings.
I'm surprised Lisbon ever made the list, however briefly.
15 Being a big fan of Taiwanese New Wave cinema, I want to see the countryside and Taipei and visit Tsai Ming-liang's cafe and Hou Hsiao-hsien's movie theater. I'm a long time vegetarian too so having many vegetarian options there is good news. Enjoy your visit!
I wonder if Taiwan is better off drawing no American attention whatsoever as long as Trump is president. Who knows what he'd do in either direction.
He might give Quemoy and Matsu to Russia.
27 True what with Trump recognizing Israel's illegal annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
20: Check out the Buenos Aires metro on a map. It's endless sprawl. Total population is ~15 million, so about the same size as LA and in the top twentyish metro areas worldwide.
29: That didn't really work out well for Tsai.
That was a joke. Of course Trump is erratic. That's why I want that bill passed, as for NATO and Japan and the ROK.
Also, they invented soup dumplings.
Shanghai would like to have a word with you.
Who are you going to believe, a guy I used to work with who was born in Tiawan or a bunch of Communists?
21: Seoul makes it briefly in the 1980s, which makes sense, Korea isn't very big. "Shrimp among whales" is an exaggeration, but not a big one. For comparison, based on current populations, it's somewhat smaller than Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, only one of whose capitals, Pegu, ever makes it.
I'm surprised by Istanbul and Naples. I feel keenly my ignorance of India.
Lots of people from Naples moved to Omaha.
37: Perhaps, but the size of a capital city and the size of the country as a whole are only weakly correlated. Seoul, as a percentage of South Korea, is huge. By one interpretation Seoul is half the country's population. I'm mostly seeing a number of ~25 million for the metropolitan area, so it should be on the chart at the end. But in other cases I see a much smaller number. So really it's a question of the chart maker's data set. And generally comparing statistics on city population data internationally is hard.
39: Sure. I picked the SEA polities because, like Korea, their capitals in general were also primate cities; if those capitals didn't make the list, it's unsurprising Seoul didn't either.
(IDK shit about Korea. Wiki says Seoul has been the capital since c.1400, I'm just assuming it became and remained primate.)
Is "primate" still used much outside of taxonomy in non-American English? Because I could use some lemur jokes.
If you go by the normal range for a species, the largest primate is the gorilla, but there's probably no one gorilla as big as the biggest human.
Yeah, I just meant that Seoul is much larger (10 millionish) than those other countries' primate cities, certainly large enough to be in the video's last frame, so we get into UPETGI's question about how the chart maker defines a city. And that's probably a function of trying to fit inconsistent data sets together. (I'd also debate whether Hanoi is a primate city, at least in recent times.)
44: Much bigger, in, today, a spectacularly richer country. I'm guessing not so much richer 1500-c.1960.
Of course you're basically right. I'm just picking nits from my ring-striped tail. Or yours. I don't know how that works really.
The obese gorilla considered in 43 probably has the most nit picking needs.
I just meant that wikipedia has Seoul fifth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population) and generally has a list that doesn't look the same. But city limits is a dumb definition and doesn't extrapolate backwards very well. So I'm just confused about what's going on.
I looked closer at the sources cited: this appears to be a description of how the pre-2000 data was compiled.
On that note, I found this comment on the video, by a historian and novelist*, bewilderingly wrong. (Of course I didn't respond to the tweet because no need to be that guy.)
As a sanity check: Tenochtitlan is estimated to have been no more than 13.5 km^2. The upper end of the range given proposes a settlement twice as dense as the most dense city district in the world right now (but admittedly not as dense as Kowloon Walled City was).
* I've only read her first novel. It's strange and requires a lot of energy to read, but in a good way that I think a lot of people here would like.
52 I've seen a lot of that sentiment on Twitter lamenting the fall of the Aztec empire to the Spanish which seems really bizarre to me as they were one of the most brutal empires to ever exist.
It's like you have never seen Twitter.
I think it is fascinating that Yonkers almost became part of NYC at the same time that brooklyn did, but voted it down and had its subway cancelled. City lines are usually so arbitrary
Although these days it doesn't look arbitrary -- I'm walking distance (longish, but a walk) from Yonkers, and it feels like density drops a lot right at the county line. But of course that's the result of a century of development outside the city boundaries.
Around that same time five of the small cities across the Hudson in New Jersey considered joining together to form a new city called Port Jersey that would have been roughly the size of NYC. They decided against it but it's interesting to consider how history might have developed if they had gone for it.
Flying into Seoul a couple years ago was amazing: HUGE CITY, mountain, ANOTHER HUGE CITY, mountain, OH WAIT WE'RE NOT DONE WITH HUGE CITIES. The disparity must be whether you count Seongnam, Incheon, etc. as part of the metropolitan aren. It certainly seemed like they'd all merged as much as possible given the landforms in the way.
Also, when people asked me what I thought of Seoul and I said I liked it, they would say, "Too many people city."
59 sounds just like flying into Bizarro Lincoln.
If I were a vegetarian and in Taiwan, I'd check out Buddhist restaurants. Might be hard to find them if you don't speak a local language though.
Takeaway from the cities graph should of course be that people in the West learn way too much about the history of Africa and the Americas, which are largely irrelevant in terms of world history in population terms, and too little about Asian history. I didn't know about Vijayanagara either until just a few years ago which is the equivalent of not knowing about the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile there really is no reason for anyone to know about the Mayans or the Inca unless you actually live in those countries.
Meanwhile there really is no reason for anyone to know about the Mayans or the Inca unless you actually live in those countries have any interest in the cultivation of maize, potatoes, beans, or quinoa. Otherwise agreed.
+the early modern Atlantic-European economy
Belatedly, Ume@3, any thoughts on their immigration reforms?
Equally I don't really think there's any reason for anyone to know about, say, the Wars of the Roses or Charlemagne or Abraham Lincoln, unless you happen to be from the relevant countries. I mean, they're fun to read about - history in general is fun - but there's no reason for them to be taught in schools outside their home turf. World history should take a population-centric view. FDR and Chatham and the French Revolution are important, even though European and American, because they affected very large chunks of the world's population. And the Civil Wars are important, even though they only really affected one very small country consisting of a cluster of decent harbours surrounding a damp wasteland of sheep standing on coal, because they set the scene for how that country would go on to affect very large chunks etc.
52. If you want to watch something drop off the map, try Vijayanagara, which as ajay says is shamefully little known outside India. But BANG, and it's gone. Apparently there are a couple of small towns on the outskirts now, and a whole lot of remarkable ruins. I suppose it's like Carthage would have been if the Romans hadn't resettled it.
Anyway, the difficulty is that you need to know who Abraham Lincoln is to understand Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but nobody from Vijayanagara made that cut.
The wijipedia entry on Vijayanagara is a wonderful piece of Hindutva, rather like my Cambridge Modern (sic) History of the Thirty Years War: Our side battling for civilisation against the barbarian hordes. whether Muslim or Catholic.
They should make someone from Vijayanagara be the leader of India on Civ. I always feel bad about using nuclear weapons on Gandhi.
I sometimes nuke Russia even when I could win without it just for the enjoyment.
I don't see the problem.
66: Long overdue and at least attempting to avoid some of the failures of previous measures, but rushed and still with potential problems. It'll be interesting to see how they work out in practice.
There are two new visa categories, designed to provide a ladder for people who've come to Japan on the "technical intern" program to stay on for an extra 5 years without the right to bring in families on the first-level visa, and to convert that to an indefinite stay and the right to bring in families if they gain sufficient qualifications to apply for the second-level visa. The intern program is also being extended from three years to five. Both stages have a language requirement, as the government basically wants only people who learn Japanese and integrate to stay, and everyone else to piss off home before they can have children.
The technical intern program has had very well-documented problems: because interns' visas are tied to a single employer, it's often equivalent to indentured servitude, with low pay, poor conditions, and frequent abuse. The new law sets out that foreigners in the new visa categories must be paid at the same level as Japanese, but I don't know whether it actually has any teeth.
There's no extra money for local municipalities to help with integration, which is definitely going to cause issues down the line. The language requirement is sufficient for day-to-day conversation, but not for reading, and being unable to read things like trash separation instructions is one of the biggest causes of friction between non-Japanese and their neighbours.
There are also obligations placed on companies recruiting foreigners to provide them with information on living in Japan, but again, I can envisage the quality of that varying very widely in practice.
But Japan is much more ready for this than it was even a decade ago. The government has been pushing to increase the number of overseas students since the turn of the millennium, and as a result there are a lot of Chinese and other Asian students now doing part-time jobs in convenience stores and fast-food restaurants in the major cities, something you never used to see at all. And the tourism boom has both made cities and tourist destinations much more foreigner-friendly and accustomed Japanese to dealing with people from other countries. Even in the deep countryside, you no longer get kids pointing or shouting "Haro!" at every non-Asian.
Whether the new workers will actually end up living in the countryside, I don't know. Trainees have to stay where their hiring company is, but once people have the right to switch jobs they tend to go to Tokyo. An exception in the past was the South Americans of Japanese descent who arrived on long-term residence visas in the 1990s, who settled around the car and electronics factories in central Japan. But they tended to come as families. It'll be interesting to see whether any large Chinese, Filipino, or Indian communities build up in other regions over the next couple of decades.
Stupid phone.
Non-hindutva reading recs on Vijayanagara would be appreciated.
people in the West learn way too much about the history of Africa
Say what?
Maybe North Africa? Probably not even then.
56: You're not wrong about the Bronx/Westchester border being largely a meaningful boundary. Going east the boundary is also reasonably meaningful, although eastern Queens is significantly less dense than the rest of the city while still being clearly more dense than the other side of the border. But the big problem is going west and south. By any reasonable measure Hoboken/Union City/Jersey City are a core part of the "city", while Staten Island is not.
http://www.simpletwig.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/pop-nyc2010.png
And once you look at other cities than NYC, or try to make cross city comparisons things get much more problematic.
Weirdly, subbing out Staten Island for the dense parts of Hudson County roughly doesn't change the population.
Weirdly on a satellite map you can already see a lot of the population density changes, but the Queens/LI boundary is not at all visible on a satellite view even though it is visible on a population density map... Maybe the density and size of houses is similar, but fewer people per structure?
They have walls, not in a way you can understand.
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NMM to Agnès Varda. A remarkable artist, generous and kind. She was invited to give a masterclass here at a filmmakers film festival that ended two weeks ago but coudn't come because of illness. Tears.
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I could use some lemur jokes.
Like, about the femurs of lemurs?
I appreciate the effort, but the moment is gone.
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RFA: There are reports that some civilians who were forcibly recruited by the KIA in Shan state have returned, while others have not. What can you say about this?Respect the honesty?
Gwan Maw: That's correct. Troops heading to the front lines for military operations take recruits along the way. They didn't have enough time to screen the recruits in the first place, so they were freed once [the troops] returned back to their bases.
Non-bookface link, with source
https://observablehq.com/@johnburnmurdoch/bar-chart-race-the-most-populous-cities-in-the-world
