Megacities

  Via The Agitator comes this article about the growth (heh heh heh... get it?) of cities with more than 10 million people. Snippet:

 "At festival times, the locals don sandals and cotton indigo happi coats before heaving the neighbourhood deity through the streets on an ornate palanquin. At harvest, they gather to pound rice cakes. Even in non-festival times, there is a sense of community. Traders call out in a sing-song voice, enticing customers into their tiny shops to buy fresh fish, homemade tofu, miso or traditional sweets. Yet this is not some out-of-the-way village or coastal town. This is a fairly typical residential street in Tokyo, the world’s biggest city – a megacity, no less, with a population of some 36m people.

The character of cities – and their larger cousins the megacities – is being rapidly redefined. We can no longer look at cities primarily through a European or North American lens. The great experiment in urbanisation that was played out in the advanced economies in the 19th and 20th centuries has shifted to the developing world, increasingly to Asia.

The biggest Asian cities, from Beijing to Jakarta and from Mumbai to Manila, have an entirely different feel from Tokyo. Most are poorer, grimier and lacking in Tokyo’s stupendous public transport. But they share with the Japanese capital, and some of the great conurbations of other continents, such as Lagos or São Paulo, a role in reshaping the definition of what a city means."