Megacity triumph : big trend and big factors in contemporary human urban settlement

Abstract

A staggering figure that 23 urban giants host around 10% of the world’s urban population by 2010 raises the questions of whether the megacity is an ever-growing totality and why more and more people concentrate in big cities. Using evidence from a cross section of 123 modern countries, exclusive data set, various variables and theories, this study attempts to explore the mega trend of contemporary human settlement during the past half century and investigates the driving factors behind the urban concentration in a country’s largest city.

Concerning the development trajectories of the contemporary human urban settlement, this research has investigated the megatrend at three scales: world scale, top 30 urban agglomerations scale and megacity scale. The statistics shows that urban population is increasingly concentrated in large cities with a population of over one million, especially megacitieswith more than 10 million inhabitants. Megacities have experienced dramatic development during the past six decades and are inevitably continuing to grow. Not only do the total number and the total population of megacities keep increasing, every megacity within itself continues to grow. The rapid urban concentration in megacities has marked a new trend of the contemporary human urban settlement. However, a divergence is found between the “Mega-local cities” from the developing countries and the most powerful “Mega-global cities” from the developed countries. In addition, the spatial rules and patterns found that a country’s population is strongly correlated with its largest city population. A country’s population might be the basic requisite for a country to have a megacity and even decide the number of megacities it can have.

In regards to the driving factors behind the urban concentration in a country’s largest city, this study has examined five driving forces, namely, trade and commerce, government power, transportation networks, technology and innovation, finance and business service. Empirical evidence found that conventional mechanisms such as trade and political factors are no longer necessarily the primary driving factors of urban agglomeration. There is a counter-conventional viewpoint found that rather than convenient transportation dispersing population, the advancement of transportation networks has been found to encourage higher urban concentration. However, upon closer examination, this study empirically proves that the widespread adoption of technology/innovation and emerging finance and business are the two new significant driving factors of urban concentration. These two factors might be the key sectors to transform a Mega-local city into a Mega-global city.