Demographics · Deep dive

New York,
dethroned

4 min read · Data: UN World Urbanization Prospects, via Our World in Data

In 1950 the largest city on Earth was New York. It has not held the title for a single year since.

Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1908
The old capital of big. Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1908. For the first half of the 20th century, the biggest-city story was a Western one. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

For most of the last century, the world's largest cities were in the West — New York, London, Paris. Then the centre of gravity moved. By the mid-1950s Tokyo had taken the lead, and it held on for decades. The ranking below has been changing hands ever since.

Metropolitan population, 1950 onward. Watch New York slip down a list it once topped.
Greater Tokyo — about 38 million people — is larger than the entire population of Canada.

Today the biggest urban areas are almost all in Asia and the global South: Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, São Paulo, Mexico City, Dhaka, Cairo. The West still has enormous, wealthy cities — but the record-holders now sit where the century's population growth actually went.

The world's largest cities today
Where the giants are. The largest metros today, sized by population. Base map: Natural Earth (public domain).

A ranking of cities is really a ranking of the century itself — a map of where the people arrived.

Source: UN World Urbanization Prospects (2018), via Our World in Data (CC BY). Test your intuition

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