Japan

Taro Moberly and the Moral Geography of Seeing

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:51:46 -0500

Kyoto is one of the most photographed cities in the world, and perhaps one of the most misunderstood. Most images of it feel decorative; tourist postcards masquerading as art, emptied of the quiet pulse that makes the city human. Taro Moberly’s Kyoto Dreaming breaks from that tradition. His work restores to the city its weight, its patience, its moral texture. His camera listens. Each frame insists that to see a place well is not an act of aesthetic consumption but of citizenship: an effort to attend, to notice, to dwell.

Moberly introduces his book not with self-assertion but with gratitude. Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, he grew up in California with Kyoto present in memory and story but distant in experience. He writes of visiting as a child - the grandeur and vastness of Kyoto Station, the floorboards of Nijo Castle, the toy-train shop on the top floor of Daimaru. In 2015 he moved there, returning to the place his mother was raised and his grandparents had called home. The move was not simply geographic; it was formative. “I discovered so much about the unique and fascinating culture of my adopted homeland,” he writes. “Kyoto has changed how I see the world and helped me become the person I am today.” When he returned to California in 2023, he carried the city inside him. “Within myself,” he concludes, “I still see Kyoto as a major part of my identity.” The book is less a record of that period than a testament to what the city taught him: that meaning and belonging are earned through attention.

The opening photographs tell the story. Two figures sit on the steps of a temple, dwarfed by the roof’s massive eaves. They are enveloped in silence. The composition honors scale without losing intimacy; we are made to feel the proportion between person and place. Moberly’s power lies in this restraint. His images are not declarations but invitations; to linger, to feel the density of the ordinary. In a time when nearly every image demands to be consumed instantly, his work asks us to slow down. His palette is subdued, his tones favoring twilight and rain. The light is not dramatic but devotional. Kyoto, in his hands, becomes less an object than a conversation: between architecture and weather, between time and memory, between the photographer and the city that made him.

To walk through the book is to sense the rhythm of a life lived attentively. We move from courtyards and alleys to the quiet ritual of commuting; umbrellas passing under red lights, taxis idling on wet streets, a parent guiding a child along a stone path lined with cherry blossoms. The repetition of these scenes accumulates into a moral vision. Moberly does not aestheticize civility; he observes it. His Kyoto is not the idealized city of postcards but the functioning city of mutual awareness, where strangers share space without spectacle. In this sense, his art offers something civic. The sociologist Richard Sennett described cities in his The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities essentially as theaters of encounter, sustained by the way strangers learn to look at one another. Moberly’s photographs record that encounter in real time. Every image reveals the choreography of coexistence: the small courtesies that hold urban life together. Pedestrians pause, cars yield, umbrellas tilt just enough to avoid collision. It is a social order built on perception.

The book’s stillness is deliberate. In an age of acceleration, stillness itself becomes a statement. Moberly resists the compulsion to dramatize. His camera does not chase decisive moments; it waits for coherence to reveal itself. This patience is a moral stance. It rebukes the attention economy that governs both photography and public life. Where the digital image thrives on speed and self-display, Moberly’s work restores scale and humility. The figures he captures are not subjects to be possessed but neighbors to be regarded. The act of seeing becomes relational, not extractive. The city, through his lens, is an organism of shared restraint.

Light is his great ally. In Moberly’s Kyoto, illumination functions like character: by turns tender, elusive, and instructive. Dawn glows faintly on tiled roofs; dusk turns wet streets into mirrors; neon reflections shimmer across taxi windows. He refuses the oversaturated brightness of commercial travel photography. His colors breathe within limits, his blues deepening toward memory rather than spectacle. In that restraint lies reverence. He allows light to emerge as revelation; to arrive, as grace does, without force. The viewer can feel the hours spent waiting for the right balance between luminosity and shadow, as if patience itself were a kind of prayer.

The formal discipline of the images echoes the discipline of the city. Kyoto’s architecture has long embodied order without rigidity - geometry in the service of grace - and Moberly composes with the same ethos. Lines of roofs and alleyways guide the eye gently; depth is earned through perspective, not manipulation. One image of wooden facades glistening after rain captures the principle perfectly: symmetry balanced by warmth, precision softened by use. He understands that restraint is not absence but articulation, that beauty often arises when ambition gives way to attention. In his visual grammar, order is not a constraint but a form of respect.

What makes Kyoto Dreaming resonate, though, is its humanity. The photographs breathe with companionship: a couple in conversation, a worker in the rain, a child discovering spring. The scenes are neither anonymous nor sentimental. They affirm continuity in an age obsessed with rupture. The red jacket of a child beneath pale blossoms becomes a symbol of renewal, the small assertion of color in a world rendered gray by haste. Moberly’s empathy is architectural, he gives his subjects room to exist within the frame. The result is intimacy without intrusion. He treats each life as belonging to the larger composition of the city, an act of recognition that carries its own civic weight.

As the book unfolds, its emotional key deepens from observation to gratitude. The late-night cityscapes - headlights diffused in rain, reflections stretching across wet crosswalks - feel like meditations on endurance. Kyoto, far from a timeless relic, appears here as a living organism: mortal, changing, resilient. Moberly captures that fragility with affection rather than melancholy. His attention dignifies transience. He shows how the fleeting can still feel eternal when looked at with care. That sensibility, inherited from the city’s own traditions, becomes the moral spine of the book: to see clearly is to care; to care is to remain human.

Moberly’s return to California closes the narrative but not the connection. “The city, the culture, and the people of Kyoto have left a profound impact,” he writes. “I will be forever grateful for the lessons and character taught to me by what now feels like my second home.” Gratitude is a rare word in contemporary art, but it fits him. He has made gratitude into a method, an aesthetic and a moral discipline. His photographs do not demand recognition; they offer it. In a culture addicted to novelty, this is a radical act. He reminds us that reverence is not nostalgia. It is attention sustained across time.

What emerges from Kyoto Dreaming is a philosophy of looking that transcends place. Moberly demonstrates that belonging begins with perception - that the ethics of seeing and the ethics of citizenship are inseparable. Cities depend on this kind of vision: on people who notice, who yield, who understand that public life survives through small acts of regard. His photographs are, in that sense, civic instruction. They teach us how to inhabit our own streets: how to look again at the surfaces we hurry past, how to find coherence in the weather of daily life.

The book could easily have been another exercise in aestheticized travel, but Moberly refuses that path. His work carries no slogans, no filters of irony or self-display. It asks us instead to practice the ancient discipline of looking until we actually see. In doing so, he joins a lineage that stretches from Saul Leiter’s New York to Masahisa Fukase’s Japan: photographers who understood that light, patience, and moral attention are ways of honoring the world.

In the end, Kyoto Dreaming is less a photobook than a form of civic meditation. It restores the bond between perception and gratitude. It reminds us that beauty is not found in the exceptional but in the continuous; in streets walked daily, rituals repeated, faces glimpsed in passing. The health of any culture depends on its ability to see in this way. When we lose that capacity, we lose not only art but sympathy, not only beauty but belonging.

Taro Moberly’s achievement is to make seeing itself feel like an act of care. Through his lens, Kyoto becomes more than a city; it becomes a teacher. It reveals how civilization survives: not through grand gestures or perfect design, but through the quiet labor of attention - one person, one street, one beam of light at a time.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Kyoto Dreaming book cover, via Taro Moberly's Instagram.

Big in Japan

Thomas Buckley — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 19:28:58 -0500

Well, it’s big in Japan.

That is what proponents of California’s high speed rail project say when asked about the whys and wherefores of the system. In other words, if it works somewhere else it will work here.

That argument, though, falls in the face of a rather basic fact: California and Japan are different.

It is true that Japan’s high speed rail system, first begun in 1964, actually makes money – a lot, in fact. The iconic first line, Shinkansen Tokaido, alone carries 90 million people a year and has an operating profit of about $4.4 billion dollars. That does not include capital costs, but teasing that number out after 60 years of operation and the privatization of the route in the late 1980s is extremely difficult – suffice to say the deal has “worked” for the owners.

There are multiple other Shinkansen lines in Japan, most of which also realize an operating profit (the latest expansion to Hokkaido – the very large island north of the Japanese mainland – has proven to be problematic, though.)

Focusing on the Tokaido line – the line typically referred to for comparison - shows a few similarities but many glaring differences. It’s distance is 320 miles, not terribly different from the 390 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Also, it takes two and half hours – again not too dissimilar - and, in a downtown to downtown comparison, is faster and more convenient than flying (though not cheaper – it’s about $100 to fly and about $160 to take the Shinkansen) just like California’s project is supposed to be.

But that’s about it.

First, there is the issue of population. The Tokaido line (with its “Nozomi” train only stopping in the largest cities and hence the fastest) runs from Tokyo to Osaka, which alone have combined populations of 17 million, compared to 11 million for LA (including the county) and San Francisco.

In the cities along the Tokaido route there are 9 million more people; in the space between LA and SF, there are less than 3 million. For comparison, the smallest city on the Tokaido is Shinagawa at 400,000 people; the smallest city on the California system is Gilroy, at 58,000. All told, the average “stop population” between LA and SF is about 250,000 – on the Tokaido/Nozomi is 2,250,000.

It is these concentrations and the economies of scale they allow that drive the success of the Tokaido line - California’s system is simply not in the same league.

The Nozomi train operates 32 1,300-seat trains each way every day; pretty much on the half-hour with fewer overnight, while the two other slower (but still high speed) trains on the same system operate much more frequently and make many more stops.

Note on the following information– when dealing with California High Speed Rail (CHSR) Authority numbers - time or money - it is a good idea to remind oneself that they have never been right before, so really really big grain - meet salt.

The CHSR system will – in its “horizon year” of 2040, operate 105 southbound and 103 northbound trains per day over the system. Southbound, 64 trains will start in San Francisco, 20 in San Jose, and 21 in Merced. Northbound, 42 trains will start in Anaheim, 44 in Los Angeles, and 17 will start in Merced (note – that means 86 trains will pass through LA northbound every day.)

The system will operate 18 hours per day, with six hours designated “peak;” about half of the trains will operate during those six hours, the other half during the 12 “off peak” hours.

That means LA’s Union Station will – during the morning commute – see a train going north about every eight minutes, every day.

Read the rest of this piece at The Point.

Thomas Buckley is the former Mayor of Lake Elsinore and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com. You can read more of his work at thomas699.substack.com.

Image: courtesy The Point.

The Unexpected Future

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 20:28:58 -0400

We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see population declines while the world’s population is due to peak sometime later this century.

This kind of long-term global demographic stagnation has not been seen since the Middle Ages. World population has been growing for centuries, but the last century has dwarfed previous rises. About 75 percent of the world’s population growth has occurred in the last hundred years, more than 50 percent since 1970. But now, population growth rates are dropping, especially in more developed nations, according to the United Nations (all subsequent references to UN research in this essay are drawn from these data).

It’s not a matter of if but when global populations will start to decline. Under the UN’s medium variant projection, the world’s population will peak in 2086, while under the low variant, the peak will occur in 2053, and by 2100, the population will be about a billion below today’s level. Demographer Wolfgang Lutz and colleagues project a global population of between 8.8 and 9.0 billion by 2050 falling to between 8.2 and 8.7 billion by 2100. The projected declines are concentrated in countries with high fertility rates, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, we will inhabit a rapidly aging planet. In 1970, the median world age was 21.5 years. By 2020, it had increased to 30.9 years, and the UN projects that it will be 41.9 years in 2100.

We are well past the time when we need to concern ourselves with Paul Ehrlich’s long-standing prophecy that humanity will “breed ourselves to extinction.” On the contrary, we need to worry about the potential ill-effects of depopulation, including a declining workforce, torpid economic growth, and brewing generational conflict between a generally prosperous older generation and their more hard-pressed successors. The preponderance of low fertility in wealthier countries also presages a growing conflict between the child-poor wealthy countries and the child-rich poor countries.

The shrinking of the rich world

Europe’s population shrank by 744,000 in 2020 and by 1.4 million last year—the largest fall on any continent since records began in 1950. Although worsened by the pandemic, this was largely an acceleration of a longstanding pattern. The EU’s population growth has been tapering for a generation, with fertility rates well below the 2.1 rate required to simply replace population The largest EU country, Germany, is forecast to drop five percent by 2050 while Italy is projected to lose 10 percent of its population. Overall, the 27-nation European Union projects that its population will drop from its 2022 figure of 447 million to 416 million by the century’s end.

European fertility has largely declined since the 1960s and the birth rate has slumped to “a 60-year low of 4 million births.” Compared to 1970, when 16.4 babies were born for every 1,000 persons, the crude birth rate dropped to 9.1 in 2020. Last year, the birth rate in England and Wales also hit a record low, with fertility rates for women under 30 at their lowest levels since records began in 1938. A fifth of all British women are childless by mid-life.

The lowest fertility rates are found in the countries of Eastern Europe, which have long been exporters of their shrinking youth populations. According to UN projections, Ukraine’s population will fall 18 percent from 2022 to 2050, even without accounting for the impact of the Russian invasion. Poland will be down 13 percent. Arch-rival Russia also faces inexorable depopulation: during 2019 (pre-pandemic), deaths were running about 50 percent higher than births there. With a 2022 population of 145 million, Russia is expected to drop to 133 million by 2050, according to the UN.

Plummeting fertility rates

Europe was the trailblazer of these new demographic trends but it is no longer an outlier. Over the past few decades, fertility has dropped precipitously in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Today, all are saddled with birth rates well below replacement rates. South Korea’s birth rates have fallen for so long that the country plans to reduce its armed services to about half their current size within 20 years.

Read the rest of this piece at Quillette.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Chart credit: Our World In Data under CC 4.0 License.

Tokyo, Osaka & Nagoya Cores: Migration Losses

Wendell Cox — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 20:28:58 -0400

As Japan fell into population decline early in the last decade, the Tokyo area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba prefectures), in something of a paradox, experienced population increases. Between 2010 and 2019, the Tokyo area added 123,000 new residents annually, reaching a population of nearly 37 million, remaining the world’s most populous urban area. In contrast, the rest of the nation lost 333,000 annually. During the pandemic, however, the Tokyo area suffered a huge loss in population growth, to 15,000 annually from 2019 to 2021, while the rest of Japan substantially reduced its annual loss to 89,000 (Figure 1). For background, the second level of government, analogous to states or provinces is 47 prefectures, four of which constitute one of the metropolitan definitions of Tokyo (Note).

Much of this near reversal was related to moving from the densest urbanization to areas where households are able to obtain more space for living, a pattern also evident in the United States, Canada, Australia and many other nations. The government of Tokyo prefecture “has repeatedly, and repeatedly again, called for the avoidance of the "Three Cs" (Closed spaces, Crowded places, and Close-contact settings).”

Net Internal Migration

With its low birth rate, differences in population growth between prefectures will tend to be principally driven by net internal migration (referred to herein as “internal migration”). Unlike the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and much of the EU, immigration is only a marginal factor in Japan.

Between 2014 and 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), the nation lost 1.1 million residents. During the same period, net internal migration to the Tokyo metropolitan area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba prefectures) was more than 780,000. This is an annual average of about 130,000. Net internal migration peaked in 2019, reaching 149,000. In that same year, only four of the other 43 prefectures experienced net gains, for a total 13,000 net migrants. Thus, the Tokyo area accounted for 92% of the net internal migration gains among the prefectures.

The pandemic changed things materially. Between 2019 and 2021, net internal migration dropped by more than 99% in the Tokyo area, to 1,300. The Tokyo area’s share of net internal migration gains dropped by 92%. The number of gaining prefectures rose from 8 to 22, while one of the Tokyo area prefectures fell into decline. As a result the gaining prefectures outside the Tokyo area rose from four to 19.

At the same time, outside the Tokyo area, net internal migration rose from minus 149,000 to minus 1,300.

Net Internal Migration in the Tokyo Area

The drop in migration to the Tokyo area was concentrated in the urban core, which consists of the special wards that formerly constituted the city of Tokyo (which was merged into Tokyo prefecture in 1943). The 23 wards experienced net internal migration in 2019 that exceeded both the number and percentage achieved by any of the prefectures outside Tokyo, with a gain of 64,000. By 2021 that figure had fallen to minus 7,000.

Net internal migration also declined in the balance of Tokyo prefecture, as well as in Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba. However, the losses from 2019 were far smaller in these areas outside the 23 ward urban core (Figure 2).

Further, decentralization is indicated by movement to the prefectures just outside the Tokyo area. These seven prefectures had all lost migrants in 2019, as a net 36,000 residents left. All these prefectures , however, gained migrants in 2021 representing a gain of 4,600, more than 3.5 times the net migration to the Tokyo area (Figure 3).

Net Internal Migration in the Osaka and Nagoya Areas

The nation’s other two most populated areas, the Osaka Area (Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto) and Nagoya experienced decentralization similar to that of the Tokyo area.

In the Osaka Area (population 18 million), the core city of Osaka gained 14,000 net domestic migrants in 2019. The balance of Osaka prefecture, as well as Kyoto, Hyogo (Kobe) and Nara prefectures all declined. By 2021, the city had a migration decline, while areas outside the city of Osaka had small gains and a small loss, all improving on their previous internal migration in 2021 (Figure 4).

In the Nagoya area (population 11 million), the city of Nagoya had gained 3,000 migrants in 2019, but lost 3,000 in 2021. The areas outside the city all lost internal migrants in 2019 (balance of Aichi Prefecture as well as Gifu and Mie). Each of these areas outside the city of Nagoya gained between 2019 and 2021 (Figure 5).

The Future?

There is a general perception that the decentralization trend will continue. In a December 2021 article entitled “Tokyo exodus: Is the capital losing its luster among businesses,” The Japan Times cited a Cabinet Office survey of Tokyo workers indicating that 38.1% “were interested in relocating outside of Tokyo’ and that the “trend was especially pronounced among those in their 20s.” The article also reported that an international accounting firm has relocated two floors of operations from nearby Tokyo Station, arguably among the most accessible by Metro (subway) and suburban rail in the world. Yahoo Japan is vacating 40% of its space “in respond to the high percentage of employees working remotely.”

In an article entitled “Why are Tokyo residents saying sayonara to Japan’s capital,” The Guardian quotes Hiroshi Takahashi, chairman of the Hometown Return Support Centre, a nonprofit that helps people relocate from the Tokyo region to rural areas, as suggesting that a national government project “to revitalise Japan’s regions is bearing fruit.” Takahashi expects the “goodbye Tokyo” to continue after the pandemic — “In the past, work was all that mattered, but now families are thinking about their living environment, too. People’s values have changed.”

Although Tokyo has arguably the world’s best transit system, the burdens of commuting remain substantial. Tokyo has the highest transit ridership in the world, and its unparalleled rail system (also the largest Metro and suburban rail systems) and suffers from intense overcrowding during rush hour. In 2018, Soranews24 reported that 11 Metro (subway) and suburban rail (private for profit) lines operated at more than 180% of capacity during rush hour — which is calculated assuming that capacity includes not only seats, but also straps used by standees. The worst case was 199%.

According to Quartz, “In five to 10 years time, it’s possible that there won’t be crowded trains anymore,” according to a private rail executive. What’s going to drive those changes is that more companies and people will become comfortable working from home, or stagger their commutes to avoid peak hours.

Of course, Japan could resume its trend of the 2010s toward hyper-centralization, as was evident in the net migration to the Tokyo Area and the cores of the Osaka and Nagoya Areas even as the rest of the nation was losing population. Given the lower birthrates in dense urban areas, this would also accelerate the country’s continuing depopulation and rapid aging.

Yet Japan is a resilient society, and civilization. It could also embrace decentralization, as is happening in so many other areas around the world, and create a more humane, more sustainable country.

Note: The term “metropolitan” is avoided to minimize confusion. First, there are multiple metropolitan area geographic area metropolitan definitions. Further, the Tokyo prefecture government name translates into “Tokyo metropolis” and is sometimes referred to as the “Tokyo metropolitan government,” including in some of the links in this article. In fact, Tokyo prefecture is “sub-metropolitan,” with about 40% of the population in the Tokyo metropolitan area, in its least populous form (14 million of the 37 million as defined above by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). There are many instances of media and even academic mischaracterization of Tokyo prefecture data as metropolitan rather than sub-metropolitan.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: Yamanote Line (central loop) at Tokyo Station (by author).

Focusing on World Megacities: Demographia World Urban Areas, 2021

Wendell Cox — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The 2021 edition of Demographia World Urban Areas includes current population estimates for the 985 identified built-up urban areas (Note 1 describes the background and methodology) with at least 500,000 population.This is a smaller number than last year, due to a methodology that rendered somewhat lower populations for some urban areas. Demographia World Urban Areas has largely converted (80%) to estimates based on the 250-meter grid square population estimates from the European Commission Global Human Settlement (GHS2015) 250-meter database.

The 500,000 and over urban areas have a combined population of 2.24 billion, about 51.4% of the world’s urban population or 28.9% of the combined world urban and rural population.

The Megacities

The most populous urban areas are the 36 megacities, each with more than 10 million residents. Megacities receive outsized attention due to their influence in media, finance and tourism, but they have only 14.8% of the urban population and 8.3% of the world population. The other urban areas in Demographia World Urban Areas (between 500,000 and 10 million) account for 20.5% of the world population, while smaller urban areas have 27.3% and rural areas 43.9% (Figure 1).

Figure 2 shows the 2021 estimated population for the megacities. The three largest megacities are considerably larger than the others. Tokyo continues its lead as the world’s largest urban area, with 39.1 million residents.Tokyo has been ranked as the world’s largest urban area since 1955, a 75 year record that falls somewhat short of London’s century long primacy, but is more than double the three decade reign of New York (below).

Tokyo holds a nearly 10% lead over second ranked Jakarta, at 35.4 million. Population estimates for the Jakarta urbanhave usually not reflected the entire built-up urban area (Note 2: Underestimation of urban area densities), Jakarta is nearly 10% larger than third ranked Delhi (31.9 million), which has emerged over the last decade as India’s largest, now holding a 10 million (30%) lead over perennial leader Mumbai.

There is a much larger 25% gap between Delhi and fourth ranked Manila (24.0 million), an urban area that, like Jakarta, has often had its population substantially under reported (Note 2). Manila is six percent larger than fifth ranked Sao Paulo, with a population of 22.5 million), which is South America’s largest urban area as well as in the Western Hemisphere.

From sixth rank on, the margins between adjacently ranked urban areas is smaller. The population gap between fifth ranked Sao Paulo and tenth ranked Guangzhou-Foshan is less than five percent. Seoul, ranked sixth with 22.4 million has also been characterized by other sources as having a much smaller population (Note 2).

Mumbai, which some predicted would become the world’s first or second largest urban area, ranked well below that, at 7th in 2021. Mumbai’s 2021 population was a full three million short of a 2020 forecast made in the mid-2000s.

Shanghai is eighth, with 22.1 million. This is well below the United Nations 2020 projection made mid-decade (27 million), population growth was virtually stopped by public policy. The Guardian attributes “gentrification” to be a major cause both in Shanghai and Beijing (below), as lower income areas are redeveloped with newer, less dense housing.

Mexico City, another urban area that had been predicted to become the world’s largest had been forecast before 1980 to reach 31 million residents by 2000. Yet, Mexico City’s 2021 population is only 21.5 million and still ranks only 9th largest in the world.

Guangzhou-Foshan continues to grow strongly and is now estimated to be China’s second largest urban area and 10th largest in the world at 21.5 million. New York, which was the world’s largest urban area for about three decades (starting in the 1920s). ranks 11th, at 20.9 million. New York is a combined urban area that includes the continuous urbanization stretching to New Haven, Connecticut.

Cairo, at 19.7 million ranks 12th and is the largest urban area in Africa. Beijing ranks 13th, with 19.4 million and like Shanghai, had its population growth slow due to population control policies.Beijing had been the world’s largest agglomeration in the early 19th century, and reached one million residents at that time.

Kolkata, which had been India’s largest urban area until 1975, ranked 14th, at 17.8 million. Moscow ranked 14th has 17.7 million, and is the largest urban area in Europe.

Los Angeles ranked 21st, at 15.5 million, dropped out of the top 20 for the first time since before 1950. Los Angeles stood as 12th in 1950, and reached as high as 6th largest from 1965 to 1975. London, with all of the urban area inside the greenbelt (urban growth boundary), has been growing in recent years and achieved megacity status for the first time. London ranks 34th and has a population of 11.2 million, having replaced #35 Paris as the largest urban area in Western Europe. London had been the world’s largest agglomeration for about 100 years to the 1920s.

Highest and Lowest Megacity Densities

Megacity urban population densities (Figure 3) range from a high of 36,900 per square kilometer in Dhaka (95,700 per square mile) and Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) at 33,200 per square kilometer (83,600 per square mile) to the least dense megacity (Figure 2, above), New York, at 1,700 per square kilometer (4,500 per square mile). In recent years, considerable peripheral development has been occurring in Dhaka, which used to have a population density well above 40,000 per square kilometer (100,000 per square mile).

Seoul has the highest urban population density among the high-income megacities, at 8,100 per square kilometer (20,900 per square mile). The highest density urban areas in the high income world are in China, Macau (27,300 per square kilometer or 70,600 per square mile) and Hong Kong (25,500 per square kilometer or 66,100 per square mile).

Largest and Smallest Urban Footprint (Urban Land Area)

New York --- often seen as the epitome of dense urbanism --- in reality has the largest urban footprint of any built-up urban area, covering 12,100 square kilometers (4,700 square kilometers). New York covers nearly 50 percent more land area than much larger Tokyo-Yokohama and 90 percent more land area than Los Angeles and 27 times the land area of Dhaka.

Dhaka has smallest urban footprint, at 456 square kilometers (176 square miles), followed closely by Kinshasa, with 466 square kilometers and 180 square miles (Figure 4).

Disruptions: The Pandemic and Remote Work

There are reports that the Covid-19 pandemic has severely impacted large urban areas, with many households relocating to smaller urban areas elsewhere or nearer the urban fringe. Much of this has to do with the rise of remote work, the practicality of which was proven by its success, and muted the economic losses that would have occurred had remote workers lost their jobs rather than continuing to work. In the years to come, pandemic related disruptions to the world’s largest urban areas will become clearer. We will continue to follow these developments.

Description of Tables

Demographia World Urban Areas contains five tables that provide summary and ranking information:

Schedule 1: World Summary: Built-Up Urban Areas Over 500,000

Schedule 2: Largest Built-Up Urban Areas in the World
Schedule 3: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Land Area (Urban Footprint)

Schedule 4: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Urban Population Density

Schedule 5: Alphabetical List of Built-Up Urban Areas

Note 1: Demographia World Urban Areas is in its 17th year of publication. It was established to provide consistency to the estimation of urban density, in the all too frequent erroneous anecdotal data. The built-up urban area is the only level at which there is sufficiency consistency and sufficient data to estimate the densities of the urban organism at anything approximating international standards.

There continues to be considerable confusion about the measurement of urban densities. The key is in comprehending the differences between urban areas and metropolitan areas. Built-up urban areas are continuously built-up development that, by definition excludes rural lands (all of the world’s land is either in urban areas or rural). This is illustrated by the Paris built up urban area and the Paris metropolitan area in Figure 5. Built-up urban areas are the city in its physical form, as opposed to metropolitan areas, which are the economic or functional cities (the labor and housing markets). These terms are defined by Cheshire, et al. of the London School of Economics (see: “People rather than places, ends rather than means: LSE economists on urban containment”).

Demographia World Urban Areas uses base year population estimates, principally from the European Commission Global Human Settlement (GHS2015) 250 meter database (grid square estimates). National statistical authority base year estimates are used where identified and consistent with international definitions.These figures are then adjusted to account for population change forecasts, principally from the United Nations and the national statistics bureaus for a current year estimate.

Demographia combines extensions of continuously built-up areas, where they are a part of a larger labor market (such as New York, Bridgeport-Stamford and New Haven, Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino and Mission Viejo and Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa).

Demographia World Urban Areas is a continuing project providing “state of the art” data. Revisions are made as more accurate satellite photographs and population estimating resources become available. As a result, Demographia World Urban Areas is not intended for trend analysis.

Note 2: Underestimation of urban area populations: Demographia World Urban Areas was the first to identify the under-estimation of population in some of the largest urban areas, by other sources. For example, Demographia’s early population estimates for the Jakarta, Delhi, Manila, Seoul-Incheon and Kuala Lumpur built-up urban areas were far higher than reported by others at the time. Other sources have revised their estimates upward. The earlier, lower estimates of others were, in actuality, municipal estimates that did not sufficiently take into consideration the spread of urbanization beyond city or other geographical limits. Demographia’s larger population estimates resulted from satellite map examination to determine the extent of individual built-up urban areas.

Photograph: Cover, 17th Annual Demographia World Urban Areas: Buenos Aires: Retiro Railway Station with the Rio de la Plata in the background (by author)

Here's to Next GM Revolution in Spring Hill, Tennessee

Dale Buss — Sun, 02 May 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Remember how states and cities breathlessly pursued Tesla’s battery “gigafactory” in 2014 and Amazon’s “HQ2” in 2018? In the 1980s, localities went after General Motors’ Saturn project with much the same ardor before the “revolutionary” initiative landed in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Here’s hoping that the new revolution GM is bringing to Spring Hill – in the form of a just-promised new EV-battery plant – goes much better than the first one did. Saturn didn’t work out anything like the automaker hoped, or promised, even after forever changing the once-sleepy hamlet south of Nashville.

Those who were there at the inception of Saturn in the early 1980s remember that the fervor surrounding GM’s $5-billion new initiative had much the same evangelical feel its commitment to battery-electric vehicles now entails. GM’s CEO at the time, Roger Smith, pledged to dislodge the Japanese from their growing dominance of the U.S. small-car market. The company even went so far as to describe Saturn as the private-sector equivalent of the moon landing.

Not surprisingly, politicians and just about anybody else they could buttonhole to help tried their utmost to land Saturn in a months-long frenzy surrounding the most sought-after industrial development of the 1980s. As the nation was still trying to crawl out from the shadow of the early-decade recession, the kind of fiscal and jobs bounty promised by Saturn would be an almost-unimaginable plum.

Governors appeared on Phil Donahue to make their pleas, James Risen wrote in the Los Angeles Times. Chicago, Iowa, Missouri and Youngstown, Ohio, were among hopeful locales that paid for recruiting billboards along Detroit’s freeways. Newspaper reporters searched garbage cans in the back of GM office buildings for hints about where Saturn would land, Risen found.

In the end, GM selected Spring Hill for Saturn. Thirty-six years ago, the announcement that GM was going to put Saturn there hit mid-Tennessee like news of an alien craft landing. Suddenly, bucolic farmland that was worth only hundreds of dollars an acre was fetching many times that amount as GM, suppliers and speculators bought it up.

One notable such beneficiary was Peter Jenkins, an author who’d become renowned for trekking across the country on foot for his book, A Walk Across America. I visited Jenkins at his Spring Hill farm as he marveled at his good fortune, not only seeing the value of his real estate rise exponentially but also being able to witness the writer’s dream of a phenomenal story of transformation unfolding literally at his front door.

Hype was high even after GM whacked the size of the planned Saturn project in two. (Reporting on that story and others helped me and a couple of other Wall Street Journal reporters garner a Pulitzer Prize nomination from the newspaper.) In 1985, GM broke ground on the new plant, and by 1990, the first Saturn SL2 rolled off the line in Spring Hill with the promise that it would change the world.

But if Saturn was a moon shot, it was more like the ill-fated Apollo 13 of 1970 than the Apollo 11 that landed the first man on the moon in 1969. Aside from some manufacturing efficiencies and dent-resistant exterior panels, Saturn simply wasn’t very innovative – and certainly fell far short of derailing the Japanese small-car juggernaut that was gobbling up market share in the U.S. from GM and other domestic makes. GM finally pulled the plug on the Saturn brand after the economic crash of 2008 and the company’s 2009 bailout by American taxpayers. During the subsequent recovery, GM began making SUVs at the plant.

Last week, GM announced the planned construction in Spring Hill of its second battery-cell plant to support the transformation of its vehicle portfolio with battery-electrics in the next 15 years. The automaker’s joint venture with LG Chem, Ultium Cells LLC, plans to spend $2.3 billion to build the plant on land leased from GM, creating 1,300 new jobs and supplying batteries to the BEVs the company plans to make at its adjoining assembly plant.

Read the rest of this piece at Flyover Coalition.

Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Photo credit: Ultium Cells, LLC

Japan Prefectures: COVID-19 Fatality Rates and Urban Densities

Wendell Cox — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 20:29:01 -0400

Japan has done remarkably well in controlling the Covid-19 virus. The nation’s death rate per million population at 0.9, is very low by international standards and the lowest among the G-7 nations. Yet there are significant variations among the prefectures — as elsewhere — by urban densities. Japan has 47 prefectures, which are the largest sub-national jurisdictions and are analogous to US states or Canadian provinces.

This article describes death rates by Japanese prefecture with comparisons to measures of urban population density. Like states in the United States or Australia or provinces in Canada, all prefectures have considerable rural land. There is considerable variation in the proportion of rural land, which makes the use of overall prefectural population densities unreliable for comparing urban densities. Urban densities, of course, are far more material with regard to a disease that spreads by personal proximity or “exposure density”.

Densely Inhabited Districts (DIDs)

We can make some tentative judgments about the relationship to urban densities by using “densely inhabited districts” (DIDS), which can be used to measure concentration of population at the prefecture level (Figure 1). According to Statistics Japan:

Densely Inhabited District which is often referred to as DID and is defined as an area a city, town or village that is composed of a groups of contiguous basic unit blocks each of which has a population density of about 4,000 inhabitants or more per square kilometer, and whose total population exceeds 5,000 as of October 1, 2000.

This article provides Covid-19 death rates by prefecture by the density of their DIDs. The Covid-19fatality data is from www.nippon.com. Population, land area and density population density data is from Statistics Japan for the 2010 census. The number of prefectures by DID density is in Figure 2.

DID Urban Population Density and COVID-19 Death Rates

Fatality ratios are higher per capita where DID densities are higher, as is illustrated in Figure 3 and Figure 4. The proportion of fatalities is compared to population shares in Figure 5.

10,000 & Over per sq. km (25,900 per sq. mi. & over): In the highest density category, the death rate of 0.0264 is approximately three times the national rate of 0.0089. The only prefecture at this density is Tokyo (called the Tokyo metropolis, but with only about one-third of the Tokyo metropolitan area population). Tokyo’s fatality rate is 5.8 times that of the prefectures with DID densities under 8,000 per square kilometer. These prefectures have 57% of the national population and a fatality rate of 0.0046 per 1,000 population. Tokyo’s proportion of national Covid-19 fatalities is 4.8 times its proportion of the population (Figure 5). Tokyo’s DID density is 12,000 per square kilometer (31,100 per square mile).

9,000 — 10,000 per sq. km (23,310 — 25,900 per sq. mi.): The only prefecture with a DID population density of from 9,000 to 10,000 per square kilometer is Osaka, which is at the core the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto urban area. Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto has been Japan’s second largest for decades and includes the city of Osaka. The fatality rate is 0.0132 per 1,000 inhabitants, half that of Tokyo. Osaka’s DID density is 9,400 per square kilometer (24,300 per square mile). Osaka’s fatality ratio is 1.49 times its share of the national population.

8,000 — 9,000 per sq. km (20,720 — 23,310 per sq. mi.): Three prefectures have DID densities of 8,000 to 9,000 per square kilometer. Their combined fatality rate is 0.0112 per 1,000, less than half that of Tokyo and just below that of Osaka. Two of the three are located adjacent to Tokyo. They are Kanagawa, where the city of Yokohama is located,bordering Tokyo on the south and Saitama, on the north. The third is Kyoto, the location of Kyoto, the former imperial capital. The three prefectures have an average DID density of 8,700 per square kilometer (22,400 per square mile). The fatality rate in Kanagawa, Saitama and Kyoto is 1.27 times their share of the population.

7,000 — 8,000 per sq. km (18,130 — 20,720 per sq. mi.): Three prefectures also have DID densities of 7,000 to 8,000 per square kilometer. One is Chiba, which borders Tokyo on the east and is the home of Narita International Airport. Hyogo, is adjacent to Osaka on the west, and includes the city of Kobe, site of the devastating 1996 earthquake. Okinawa is the third, located well to the south of Kyushu, the most southerly of Japan’s four large islands.The combined fatality rate was 0.0093, just above the national rate of 0.0089. These prefectures have approximately the same share of Covid-19 fatalities as their populations (1.05).

6,000 — 7,000 per sq. km (15,540 — 18,130 per sq. mi.): The four prefectures with DID densities between 6.000 and 7,000 per square kilometer have a fatality rate of 0.0061 per thousand, well below the national rate. One is Aichi, the core of the Nagoya urban area. Another is Shiga, which separates Aichi from Kyoto. Nara, located immediately east of Osaka is also just south of Kyoto and preceded it as national capital. The last is Fukuoka, which includes the two major urban areas of Fukuoka and Kitakyushu. These fatalities in the four prefectures aremore than 30% below their share of the national population.

Under 6,000 per sq. km (Under 15,540 per sq. mi.): The prefectures with DID densities under 6.000 per square kilometer have an overall fatality rate of 0.0042 per thousand, less than one-half the national rate. These fatalities in the four prefectures are more than 50% below their share of the national population.

Densely Inhabited Districts and Urbanization

The 4,000 per square kilometer density threshold of the DIDs is far higher than the generally accepted international urban density threshold of 400 per square kilometer. According to the United Nations, 90.8% of Japan’s population was urban in 2010. The data above do not include the more than one quarter of urbanization in Japan that is not in densely inhabited districts (Figure 6).

Lockdown Avoided

Interestingly, Japan did not implement a formal legal lockdown. According to the BBC, the government launched “a nationwide campaign warning people to avoid the ‘Three Cs’:

Enclosed spaces with poor ventilation
Crowded places with many people
Close contact setting such as face-to-face conversations.”

The campaign was successful. During May, Google Mobility report data indicates that visits to workplaces in Tokyo prefecture were down a daily average of more than 40%. Dr Kazuaki Jindai, of Kyoto university and member of the cluster-suppression taskforce told BBC: "I think that probably worked better than just telling people to stay at home".

Despite Japan’s success in managing Covid-19, Japan still exhibits a similar population dynamic as other nations with much higher death rates, such as the United Kingdom and the United States —where fatality rates are far higher where there are higher urban population densities. It is not the population densities alone, but more importantly that there is a much greater likelihood of overcrowded conditions.

As an open letter from 239 scientists in 32 countries to the World Health Organization (WHO) put it, the “problem is especially acute in indoor or enclosed environments, particularly those that are crowded and have inadequate ventilation relative to the number of occupants and extended exposure periods.”

Japan has indeed done an exemplary job on the pandemic, but still the same dynamics of greater infection in denser areas indicates a pattern that transcends nations, cultures and continents.

Photograph: Fukuoka, Japan central business district (by author)

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Face Panties

John Sanphillippo — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 20:29:01 -0400

Some years ago I was enjoying another visit to Japan when I noticed ordinary people wearing face masks. It wasn’t everyone. And it wasn’t all the time. But it was common enough that no one seemed to notice or care.

It was a normal thing in Japanese culture. And it was primarily about protecting the larger community, not just the person wearing the mask.

I’ve had cases of N95 masks on hand for years. At first they were useful when I did woodworking projects to keep from breathing in sawdust and fumes. Then we had repeated waves of massive forest fires year after year and the N95 masks came in handy to help manage the smoke. Now we have COVID-19. The fashion du jour is to not wear N95s unless they’re being used in a medical capacity, so I bought some washable masks for everyday outings. My neighbor took one look at them in the laundry and instantly labeled them “face panties.” Bing! Meme. Hashtag. Zeitgeist.

There’s a particular strain of culture that sees any form of protective equipment as a sign of weakness and submission. The motorcycle helmet is the classic example. (Back in my university days I had a friend who was in medical school who referred to them as “donorcycles.”) What’s the point of being all butch in your crotch rocket if you negate the testosterone with a girlie helmet? The risk of accidental death or dismemberment is the whole point of being a rebel. #Face panties implies that anyone who wears one is a _________. I’ll let you fill in that blank.

In the American context there’s a deep distrust for central authority and a romantic vision of rugged individuals. But with very few exceptions most of us live pretty tame lives in highly constrained environments on quiet cul-de-sacs with vigilant home owners associations keeping tabs on everyone’s drapes and shrubbery. So we direct our need to be cowboys and outlaws in highly symbolic and irrelevant ways. I don’t have a horse in this race. But it is fascinating to watch.

This piece originally appeared on Granola Shotgun.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He's a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

Demographia World Urban Areas, 2020: Tokyo Lead Diminishing

Wendell Cox — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 20:29:01 -0400

For the first time in more than six decades the world’s second ranked built-up urban area has reached within 10% of leader Tokyo. The 2020 edition of Demographia World Urban Areas reports that Jakarta has reached a population of 34.5 million, behind Tokyo-Yokohama’s 38.0 million (Figure 1). The report can be downloaded here (Note 1). Yet Tokyo’s growth has slowed, a reflection of Japan’s overall demographic implosion, although it is still adding people while the country is losing population.

Background

Built-up urban areas are continuously built-up development that excludes rural lands (Note 2) are formally defined by a number of nations, using relatively similar criteria. Demographia develops urban area definitions (urban perimeters) based on satellite images for all known built-up urban areas for which there is no formal national census authority definition. Demographia combines extensions of continuously built up areas (as designated by census authorities), where they are a part of a larger labor market (such as New York, Bridgeport-Stamford and New Haven, Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino and Mission Viejo and Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa).

Demographia World Urban Areas provides pre-COVID-19 population estimates for all of the 1,055 identified built-up urban areas with 500,000 or greater population. The list includes a total population equal to 51.7% of the estimated world urban population (Figure 2).

Population estimates are based on national statistical authority estimates for built-up urban areas consistent with international practice are available. Beginning with this year, most other larger built-up urban area populations are estimated based on small area grids that provide population estimates that are tailored for the urban perimeters (Note 3).

Demographia World Urban Areas contains five tables that provide summary and ranking information:

Table 1: World Summary: Built-Up Urban Areas Over 500,000
Table 2: Largest Built-Up Urban Areas in the World
Table 3: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Land Area (Urban Footprint)
Table 4: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Urban Population Density
Table 5: Alphabetical List of Built-Up Urban Areas

The Principal Challenger: Jakarta

Jakarta’s urban area now spreads from the Special Capital Region, to Tangerang and South Tangerang to the West, the city of Bogor to the south and to Karawang Regency to the East. Even with this massive land area of 3,540 square kilometers (1,367 square miles), Jakarta covers less than one-half the territory of Tokyo-Yokohama. But Jakarta’s population density is 9,800 per square kilometer (25,300 per square mile), more than double that of Tokyo-Yokohama’s 4,600 per square kilometer (12,000 per square mile).

However, storm clouds threaten Jakarta’s future growth. The present city site has extreme environmental challenges, such as sinking due to ground water extraction, as well as some of the world’s worst traffic congestion. The government has announced plans to move the capital by 2024 (video) to the sparsely populated province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo (about 1,300 kilometers or 800 miles from Jakarta).

A 2024 move date is very aggressive and even if achieved may not slow Jakarta’s pursuit of the number one spot (assuming continuation of present projected growth rates). Previous national capital moves do not appear to have materially reduced the growth in the urban areas the capitals have deserted. For example, Brasilia is perhaps the most successful post-World War II new national capital, measured in terms of its population growth. In the two decades following its 1960 opening, Brasilia struggled to reach 1.3 million residents, while Rio de Janeiro added 4.3 million.

India’s Largest Megacities

However, if in the unlikely event that Jakarta should falter, fast growing Delhi, the world's third largest built-up urban area should pass Tokyo-Yokohama by 2035. Delhi has a population of 29.6 million residents and a density of 13,300 per square kilometer (34,400 per square mile). Delhi should continue to widen the gap over Mumbai that currently stands at 6.5 million. Mumbai used to be India’s largest built-up urban area.

Even so, Mumbai ranks as the fourth largest built-up urban area in the world, with a population density of 24,800 per square kilometer (64,200 per square mile), making it the second densest megacity (built-up urban area over 10 million) in the world, trailing only Dhaka. It is also slightly less dense than Hong Kong, which is the densest high-income world built-up urban area (25,300 per square kilometer 65,600 per square mile).

Other Population Leaders

Manila is now the fifth largest built-up urban area, with 23.1 million residents. Manila has a population density of 12,300 per square kilometer (31,900 per square mile). The top ten built-up urban areas are rounded out by Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Seoul-Incheon, Mexico City and Guangzhou-Foshan.

Largest Urban Footprint (Urban Land Area)

New York has the largest urban footprint of any built-up urban area, covering 12,100 square kilometers (4,700 square kilometers). New York covers about 50 percent more land area than much larger Tokyo-Yokohama and 90 percent more land area than Los Angeles.

Highest Urban Density

Dhaka, ranked 19^th with a population of 15.4 million, continues to have the highest urban population density, at 33,900 per square kilometer (87,700 per square mile). This is 19 times as dense as the New York built-up urban area. Kinshasa is the second densest, at 28,500 per square kilometer (73,900 per square mile).

Decline of the West

For the first time, the high-income West is not represented in the 10 largest urban areas (Figure 3). In 1950, four such cities — New York, London, Paris and Chicago — were on the United Nations list. New York, which had been the largest built-up urban area from the 1920s to 1950, fell to 11^th place, while the others had long ago fallen out. Chicago has suffered the largest drop, from 8^th to 41^st. That is despite a near doubling of its population from 1950 to 2020. The Los Angeles built-up urban area, which ranked 12^th in 1950, nearly quadrupled its population, but fell to 20^th, after having reached 6^th largest from 1965 to 1975.

Note 1: Demographia World Urban Areas was the first to identify the under-estimation of population in some of the largest urban areas, by other sources. For example, Demographia’s early population estimates for the Jakarta, Delhi, Manila, Seoul-Incheon and Kuala Lumpur built-up urban areas were far higher than reported by others at the time. Other sources have revised their estimates upward. The earlier, lower estimates of others were, in actuality, municipal estimates that did not sufficiently take into consideration the spread of urbanization beyond city or other geographical limits. Demographia’s larger population estimates were the result of examining actual satellite maps to determine the extent of individual built-up urban areas.

Note 2: Demographia World Urban Areas is in its 16th year of publication. It was established for the purpose of bringing some consistency to the subject of urban density, in hopes of replacing often grossly invalid anecdotal comparisons between cities. The built-up urban area is the only level at which there is sufficiency consistency and sufficient data to estimate the densities of the urban organism at anything approximating international standards.

There continues to be considerable confusion about the measurement of urban densities. The key is in comprehending the differences between urban areas and metropolitan areas. Built-up urban areas are continuously built-up development that excludes rural lands. This is illustrated by the Paris built up urban area and the Paris metropolitan area in Figure 4. Built-up urban areas are the city in its physical form, as opposed to metropolitan areas, which are the economic or functional cities (the labor and housing markets). These terms are defined by Cheshire, et al. of the London School of Economics (see: “People rather than places, ends rather than means: LSE economists on urban containment”).

Demographia World Urban Areas uses base population figures, derived from official census and estimates data, to develop basic year population estimates within the confines of built-up urban areas. These figures are then adjusted to account for population change forecasts, principally from the United Nations or the various national statistics bureaus for a 2018 estimate.

Note 3: Demographia World Urban Areas is a continuing project providing “state of the art” data. Revisions are made as more accurate satellite photographs and population estimating resources become available. As a result, Demographia World Urban Areas is not intended for trend analysis.

Photograph: Cover, 16^th Annual Demographia World Urban Areas (Guangzhou: Zhujiang New Town).

Death Spiral Demographics: The Countries Shrinking The Fastest

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 09:01:17 -0500

For most of recent history, the world has worried about the curse of overpopulation. But in many countries, the problem may soon be too few people, and of those, too many old ones. In 1995 only one country, Italy, had more people over 65 than under 15; today there are 30 and by 2020 that number will hit 35. Demographers estimate that global population growth will end this century.

Rapid aging is already reshaping the politics and economies of many of the most important high-income countries. The demands of older voters are shifting the political paradigm in many places, including the United States, at least temporarily to the right. More importantly, aging populations, with fewer young workers and families, threaten weaker economic growth, as both labor and consumption begin to decline.

We took a look at the 56 countries with populations over 20 million people, nine of which are already in demographic decline. The impact of population decline will worsen over time, particularly as the present generation now in their 50s and 60s retires, begins drawing pensions and other government support.

Europe: Homeland of Demographic Decline

Heading up our list of slowly dissipating large countries is the Ukraine, a country chewed at its edges by its aggressive Russian neighbor. According to U.N. projections, Ukraine’s population will fall 22% by 2050. Eastern and Southern Europe are home to several important downsizing countries including Poland (off 14% by 2050), the Russian Federation (-10.4%), Italy (-5.5%) and Spain (-2.8%). The population of the EU is expected to peak by 2050 and then gradually decline, suggesting a dim future for that body even if it holds together.

The most important EU country, Germany, has endured demographic decline for over a generation. Germany’s population is forecast to drop 7.7% by 2050, though this projection has not been adjusted to account for the recent immigration surge. The main problem is the very low fertility rate of the EU’s superpower, which according to United Nations data was 1.4 between 2010 and 2015. It takes a fertility rate of 2.1% to replace your own population so we can expect Germany to shrink as well as get very old.

Nor can Europe expect much help from its smaller countries. Although too small to reach our 20 million person threshold, many of Europe’s tinier “frontier” countries have abysmal fertility rates. Among the 10 smaller countries with the greatest population declines, all are in Europe, and outside Western Europe, with Bulgaria’s population expected to shrink 27% by 2050 and Romania’s 22%. Each of these have below replacement rate fertility. Things are not that much better in Western Europe, where fertility rates are also below replacement rates, but not quite so low. Long-term, the only option for Europe may be to allow more immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East, although this may be impossible due to growing political resistance to immigration.

Demographic Decline: The Asian Edition

If this were just a European disease, it would not prove such a challenge to the economic future. Europe is gradually diminishing in global importance. The big story in demographic trends is in Asia, which has driven global economic growth for the past generation. The decline of Japan’s population is perhaps best known; the great island nation, still the world’s third largest economy, is expected to see its population fall 15% by 2050, the second steepest decline after Ukraine, and get much older. By 2030, according to the United Nations, Japan will have more people over 80 than under 15.

But the biggest hit on the world economy from the new demographics will come from China, the planet’s second largest economy, and the most dynamic.

Until a generation ago, overpopulation threatened China’s future, as it still does some developing countries. Today the estimates of the country’s fertility rate run from 1.2 to 1.6, both well below the 2.1 replacement rate. By 2050 China’s population will shrink 2.5%, a loss of 28 million people. By then China’s population will have a demographic look similar to ultra-old Japan’s today — but without the affluence of its Asian neighbor.

Other Asian countries have similar problems. Thailand ranks as the fifth most demographically challenged, with a projected population loss of 8%. The population of Sri Lanka, just across Adam’s Bridge from still fast-growing India, is projected to increase only 0.6%.

Also going into a demographic stall is South Korea, another country which a generation ago worried about its expanding population. With its fertility rate well below replacement (1.3), the country will essentially stagnate over the next 35 years, and will becoming one of the most elderly nations on earth.

Full List: The Countries Shrinking The Fastest

Smaller Singapore is an anomaly. The city-state has a rock-bottom fertility rate of 1.2, but projects a population increase of 20% by 2050 due to its liberal and vigorously debated immigration policies.

Economic Consequences

Most world leaders are fixated on the unpredictable new administration in Washington in the short term, but they might do better to look at the more certain long-term impacts of diminishing populations on the world’s most important economies. Economists, including John Maynard Keynes, have connected low birth rates to economic declines. On the “devil” of overpopulation, Keynes wrote, “I only wish to warn you that the chaining up of the one devil may, if we are careless, only serve to loose another still fiercer and more intractable.”

It is already fairly clear that lower birthrates and increased percentages of aged people have begun to slow economic growth in much of the high-income world, and can be expected to do the same in long ascendant countries such as China and South Korea. Economists estimate that China’s elderly population will increase 60% by 2020, even as the working-age population decreases by nearly 35%. This demographic decline, stems from the one-child policy as well as the higher costs and smaller homes that accompany urbanization, notes the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt. China’s annual projected GDP growth rate will likely decline from an official 7.2% in 2013 to a maximum of 6% by 2020.

There are several reasons these demographic shifts portend economic decline. First, a lack of young labor tends to drive up wages, sparking the movement of jobs to other places. This first happened in northern Europe and Japan will increasingly occur now in Korea, Taiwan, and even China. It also lowers the rate of innovation, notes economist Gary Becker, since change tends to come from younger workers and entrepreneurs. Japan’s long economic slowdown reflects, in part, the fact that its labor force has been declining since the 1990s and will be fully a third smaller by 2035.

The second problem has to do with the percentage of retirees compared to active working people. In the past growing societies had many more people in the workforce than retirees. But now in societies such as Japan and Germany that ratio has declined. In 1990, there were 4.7 working age Germans per over 65 person. By 2050, this number is projected to decline to 1.7. In Japan the ratios are worse, dropping more than one-half, from 5.8 in 1990 to 2.3 today and 1.4 in 2050. China, Korea and other East Asian countries, many without well-developed retirement systems, face similar challenges.

Finally, there is the issue of consumer markets. Aging populations tend to buy less than younger ones, particularly families. One reason countries like Japan and Germany can’t reignite economic growth is their slowing consumption of goods. This challenge will become all the more greater as China, the emerging economic superpower, also slows its consumption. The future of demand, critical to developing countries, could be deeply constrained.

What about the USA?

To a remarkable extent, the United States has avoided these pressing demographic issues. The U.N. has the U.S. tied with Canada for the fastest projected population growth rate of any developed country: a 21% expansion by 2050. Yet this forecast could prove inaccurate.

One threat stems from millennials who, even with an improved economy, have not started families and had children at anything close to historical rates. Today the U.S. fertility rate has dropped to 1.9 from 2.0 before the Great Recession; population growth is now lower than at any time since the Depression. This places us below replacement level for the next generation. Projections for the next decade show a stagnant, and then falling number of high school graduates, something that should concern both employers and colleges. The United States’ high projected population growth rate, like that of Singapore, is entirely dependent upon maintaining high rates of immigration.

But even before the election of Donald Trump, who is hell-bent on cracking down on at least undocumented immigration, total immigration to the United States has been slowing. At the same time the fertility rates of some immigrant groups, notably Latinos, have been dropping rapidly and approaching those of other Americans. This is despite the fact that as many as 40% of women would like to have more children; they simply lack the adequate housing, economic wherewithal and spousal support to make it happen.

In the coming decades, the countries that can maintain an at least somewhat reasonable population growth rate, and enough younger people, will likely do best. To a large extent, it’s too late for that in much of Europe and East Asia. For countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, with among the most liberal immigration policies and large landmasses, the prospects may be far better. However, we also need native-born youngsters to launch, get married and start creating the next generation of Americans.

This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Ahmet Demirel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons