Statista Racing Bars: The Rise & Fall & Rise of The World's Largest Cities скачать в хорошем качестве

Statista Racing Bars: The Rise & Fall & Rise of The World's Largest Cities

Did you know that Istanbul was Constantinople? Even Old New York was once New Amsterdam. Any They Might Be Giants fans out there get it ;) For today's Racing Bar animation, we're starting waaaaay back in 500AD and doing a Big Bang Theory intro-inspired journey to 2020 with Tokyo as the largest city in the world when taking urban agglomeration into account. With 37.4 million inhabitants, it's leagues ahead of the Indian city of Delhi, which 30.3 million people called their home in 2020. While the names of today's biggest cities like Osaka, São Paulo or Mexico City ring a bell for most people, the picture is decidedly different when looking at the biggest cities over time. Looking back to the 6th century AD, only experts or dedicated history hobbyists could have guessed that Ctesiphon, the royal capital of the Iranian empire for over 800 years, was the most-populated city together with Constantinople with about 400,000 inhabitants. The latter ranks among the cities with the highest population until the 20th century. From the 13th to the 15th century, cities from China and Japan started to enter the cities with the most residents around the world. Notable examples include Beijing, which had roughly 400,000 inhabitants in 1300 AD and is one of the biggest cities today with 20.5 million residents in 2020, and Guangzhou, which dropped out of the top 10 in the 20th century. This break around the 20th century and the following rise of megacities between 1900 and 2000 is no coincidence. With the ongoing industrialization transforming society from an agrarian to an industrial one focused on the manufacturing of goods, urbanization rates started to climb drastically in the latter half of the 20th century. According to World Bank data, one-third of the world's population lived in urban surroundings in 1960, while in 2020, 56 percent of the population could be categorized as city dwellers. This turned cities not only into seats of power and commerce, but also production. Interestingly, only one city managed to be in or around the top 10 biggest cities for almost a millenium: The Egyptian city of Cairo, which reportedly had 100,000 inhabitants in 800 AD, fell out of the top ranking in 1700 AD and returned to become the sixth-biggest city in the world in 2020.