The Earth now boasts 20 or so megacities — urban agglomerations where the United Nations estimates the population has reached 10 million or more. The world’s rapid urbanization is a reality, and the dangers are obvious; overcrowding, pollution, poverty, impossible demands for energy and water all result in an overwhelming sense these megacities will simply collapse. .
Among these megacities, The World Bank says Dhaka, Bangladesh, with its current population of 15 million people, bears the distinction of being the fastest-growing in the world.
Dhaka was founded during the 10th century. It served as the Mogul capital of Bengal from 1608 to 1704 and was a trading center for British, French, and Dutch interests before coming under British rule in 1765. In 1905 it was again named the capital of Bengal, and in 1956 it became the capital of East Pakistan. The city suffered heavy damage during the Bangladesh war of independence (1971). The Anglicized spelling of the Bengali name was changed from Dacca to Dhaka in 1982.
Between 1990 and 2005, the city doubled in size — from 6 to 12 million. By 2025, the U.N. predicts Dhaka will be home to more than 20 million people — larger than Mexico City, Beijing or Shanghai.
Mass migration, booming populations and globalized trade are swelling cities worldwide, but these forces are perhaps more powerfully concentrated in Dhaka than anywhere on earth — offering a unique window on an urban planet soon to come.
The earth’s countryside is emptying out, more quickly all the time. It took about 10,000 years for the human population to become 3 percent urban — a period extending roughly from the dawn of human settlement until 1800. A century later, Earth was still just 14 percent urban. But in 2007, the United Nations announced we’d crossed a monumental threshold. For the first time, more than 50 percent of the world lived in cities rather than rural villages and farms. By 2030, some projections say more than 80 percent of humanity will be urban, with many inhabiting the slum-choked cities of the developing world.
In the simplest sense, this transformation has a dual cause: Masses of migrants are abandoning the countryside, and they keep having babies after coming to town. By some accounts, fertility is the larger slice of the pie.“It’s roughly a 40/60 split,” said Deborah Balk, an urbanization specialist with the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research in New York City. “We have more large concentrations of people than we’ve ever had before. That is new. And those concentrations themselves, they have momentum.”
By 2025 the U.N. predicts that Delhi, Dhaka, Calcutta, Mumbai, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo and Shanghai will all have populations of more than 20 million. Tokyo is projected to become home to some 37 million — three times the current population of Greece.
A few of the elder giants — New York, Tokyo, Paris — grew huge under the influence of forces that helped give birth to modernity itself: the rise of nation states, manufacturing and mass domestic markets. “The old cities developed out of industrialization,” Balk said. “But you don’t see that happening now.”
Most of the newest Megacities are getting big without growing rich. Lagos, Nigeria; Karachi, Pakistan; and Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, barely registered on the world stage at mid-century. The millions inhabiting each city now still survive largely off the financial grid.
“These are poor cities.” Balk said. “There was poverty in London, New York, and Paris and Tokyo 100 years ago — and there still is poverty in those cities — but they never had slums in the way you see in today’s contemporary poor cities.”
Among these slum cities, Dhaka represents an extreme case. The Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies estimates that as much as half of Dhaka’s population lives in the vast, hand-built shantytowns that grow here like kudzu on any open patch of ground — beside rail lines, along riverbanks and in swampy lowlands shadowed by high-rise hotels.
“The megacity of the poor,” is how the urban geographer Nazrul Islam describes his hometown. He estimates that about 70 percent of Dhaka’s households earn less than $170 per month. The bottom 40 percent take home less than half that, he said. Most of the migrants come betting life in Dhaka will beat life in the village. Unlike in China, which places stiff restrictions on internal migration, it’s a choice Bangladeshis are free to make.
The displaced have few options. This river-delta nation sits wedged between India and Myanmar and it remains one of the most densely settled countries on Earth. Bangladesh’s population of 150 million people — about half the United States — is crammed into an area smaller than the state of Iowa. The country has only one administrative and economic center, Dhaka. For Bangladeshis on the move, Islam said, “their first destination is always the city, Dhaka.”
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