The Megacity: Here Comes Tomorrow, Ready or Not

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What's a Megacity?
According to most sources, it is any city (or "urban area," which may include several cities, outlying communities, etc.) with a population of over ten million. As of this writing, Wikipedia cites 26 megacities in 2011, ranging from Paris (with just over ten million souls) to Tokyo (which, including Yokohama and the intermediate area, is home to a staggering 34 million). The top five megacities in the world in 2011 are, in order of population: Tokyo, Guangzhou, Seoul, Delhi, Mumbai, Mexico City, New York City, Sao Paulo, Manila, and Shanghai. Depending on where you draw the city limits and other criteria, exact numbers and order may vary, but nobody can deny, at the very least, the awesome size and scope of the world's largest connurbations.

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Above: Today’s megacities

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Around a billion people—almost half of the developing world’s urban population—live in slums. The United Nations Human Settlements Program, in a 2003 report titled “The Challenge of the Slums,” declared, “The urban poor are trapped in an informal and ‘illegal’ world—in slums that are not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid, and where public services are not provided. Officially, they do not exist.” According to the report, “Over the course of the next two decades, the global urban population will double, from 2.5 to 5 billion. Almost all of this increase will be in developing countries.”

In 2000, the United Nations established the Millennium Development Goals. One of them is to improve the lives of a hundred million slum dwellers by 2020, in terms of shelter, water, sewers, jobs, and governance. This will require enormous expenditures of money and effort, but even if the goal is achieved nearly a quarter of the world’s population—more than two billion people—will still be living in conditions like those in Lagos.
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Why Should You Care?
Simply put, because megacities are the wave of the future. All around the world, from Africa to Asia to South America and beyond, old social patterns are crumbling as millions flood the already-huge cities and they grow even larger. The results will be wide-ranging: ecomomic, social, environmental, geopolicial. They will shape the very nature of humanity in the century ahead, and the city will exert more influence of man than it has in history.

The flood of those moving from country to city shows no sign of slowing down. In 1950, there was only one megacity on Planet Earth: New York City. Today there are 26...and tomorrow? Consider the following:

In 1800, only 3% of the world's population lived in cities, a figure that has risen to 47% by the end of the twentieth century. In 1950, there were 83 cities with populations exceeding one million; by 2007, this number had risen to 468. If the trend continues, the world's urban population will double every 38 years. The UN forecasts that today's urban population of 3.2 billion will rise to nearly 5 billion by 2030, when three out of five people will live in cities.[5]
This increase will be most dramatic on the least-urbanized continents, Asia and Africa. Surveys and projections indicate that all urban growth over the next 25 years will be in developing countries. One billion people, one-sixth of the world's population, now live in shanty towns. In many poor countries overpopulated slums exhibit high rates of disease due to unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and lack of basic health care. By 2030, over 2 billion people in the world will be living in slums. Over 90% of the urban population of Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda, three of the world's most rural countries, already live in slums.

By 2025, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia alone will have at least 10 megacities, including Mumbai, India (33 million), Shanghai, China (27 million), Karachi, Pakistan (26.5 million), Dhaka, Bangladesh (26 million) and Jakarta, Indonesia (24.9 million people). Lagos, Nigeria has grown from 300,000 in 1950 to an estimated 12.5 million today, and the Nigerian government estimates.
Source:
Wikipedia

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Above: Tokyo commuters

The topic of the megacity offers much that will be of interest to ATS. One can consider, for example, how the fabric of life has coarsened in many megacities over the last half-century, and how these communities have managed different types of decline. In many of the largest cities in Africa and Asia (such as Lagos, Nigeria -- see below), the quality of life has visibly and dramatically declined for the average person compared with 30 years ago. As communities in the first world struggle with slashed budgets and collapsing social structures, there is much to learn from the ways cities in the third world have dealt with similar pressures over the intervening years. The fact that a city like Lagos can see a marked decline in the average standard of living, yet still swell in population and not break down into open rebellion should be pondered soberly and carefully by all who contemplate a future first world in decline.

Beyond this, megacities offer rich picking for discussion: Everything from the nature of money and street-level networks in creating an economy that economists say shouldn't exist, to the way work, medical issues, resource use, living space, family, quality of life, and tradition will be understood as the 21st century unfolds.

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Lagos, Nigeria: Cellular-Level Chaos

In 1950, fewer than three hundred thousand people lived in Lagos. In the second half of the twentieth century, the city grew at a rate of more than six per cent annually. It is currently the sixth-largest city in the world, and it is growing faster than any of the world’s other megacities (the term used by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements for “urban agglomerations” with more than ten million people). By 2015, it is projected, Lagos will rank third, behind Tokyo and Bombay, with twenty-three million inhabitants.
More at source.

To get a better grip on the megacity phenomenon, let's look briefly at one example: Lagos, Nigeria.
Anyone interested is referred to the excellent article The Megacity: Decoding The Chaos of Lagos by George Packer, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2006.

The Third Mainland Bridge is a looping ribbon of concrete that connects Lagos Island to the continent of Africa. It was built in the nineteen-seventies, part of a vast network of bridges, cloverleafs, and expressways intended to transform the districts and islands of this Nigerian city—then comprising three million people—into an efficient modern metropolis. As the bridge snakes over sunken piers just above the waters of Lagos Lagoon, it passes a floating slum: thousands of wooden houses, perched on stilts a few feet above their own bobbing refuse, with rust-colored iron roofs wreathed in the haze from thousands of cooking fires. Fishermen and market women paddle dugout canoes on water as black and viscous as an oil slick. The bridge then passes the sawmill district, where rain-forest logs—sent across from the far shore, thirty miles to the east—form a floating mass by the piers. Smoldering hills of sawdust landfill send white smoke across the bridge, which mixes with diesel exhaust from the traffic. Beyond the sawmills, the old waterfront markets, the fishermen’s shanties, the blackened façades of high-rise housing projects, and the half-abandoned skyscrapers of downtown Lagos Island loom under a low, dirty sky. Around the city, garbage dumps steam with the combustion of natural gases, and auto yards glow with fires from fuel spills. All of Lagos seems to be burning.

The bridge descends into Lagos Island and a pandemonium of venders’ stalls crammed with spare parts, locks, hard hats, chains, screws, charcoal, detergent, and DVDs. On a recent afternoon, car horns, shouting voices, and radio music mingled with the snarling engines of motorcycle taxis stalled in traffic and the roar of an air compressor in an oily tire-repair yard. Two months earlier, a huge cast-iron water main suspended beneath the bridge had broken free of its rusted clip, crushing a vacant scrap market below and cutting off clean water from tens of thousands of the fifteen million people who now live in Lagos.

In the absence of piped water, wealthier residents of the waterfront slum at the end of the bridge, called Isale Eko, pay private contractors to sink boreholes sixty feet deep. All day and night, residents line up at the boreholes to pay five cents and fill their plastic buckets with contaminated water, which some of them drink anyway. Isale Eko is the oldest and densest part of Lagos Island. Every square foot is claimed by someone—for selling, for washing, even for sleeping—and there is almost no privacy. Many residents sleep outdoors. A young man sitting in an alley pointed to some concrete ledges three feet above a gutter. “These are beds,” he said.

In the newer slums on the mainland, such as Mushin, rectangular concrete-block houses squeeze seven or eight people into a single, mosquito-infested room—in bunks or on the floor—along a narrow corridor of opposing chambers. This arrangement is known as “face me I face you.” One compound can contain eighty people. In Mushin, Muslim Hausas from the north of Nigeria coexist uneasily with mostly Christian Yorubas from the south. Armed gangs represent the interests of both groups.
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Above: Lagos is full of yellow passenger minibuses known as danfo

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For more information
Recent books that treat the megacity phenomenon that might be of interest include the following:
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
Maximum City by Suketu Mehta
Shadow Cities by Robert Neuwirth
Lagos: How It Works by Rem Koolhaas

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Just viewing those pictures make me grateful for my 1 acre in the country, far from all the stench, decay and chaos!

What boggles my mind is if any disaster strikes those areas it will be apocalyptic!

Beautifully put together thread, well done. I understand the 'need' to flock to these megacities, for ecconomic reasons, food etc. But I feel a horrible sense of 'get me the hell out of here' at a crowded market place or fair. To be unable to escape that feeling, to me, would be unbearable. Give me space to spread my arms and twirl around disney style, without smacking 13 people and a monkey across the face.

This is a truly excellent thread silent thunder. Thank you for posting it.

One of the biggest issues for megacities is transportation and at least in the city where I live, not enough is being done to address gridlock.

With respect to housing, higher density living has quickly become the norm throughout the past decade. I personally would trade all the amenities in the world though, for a little breathing room. Land: they're not making any more of it.