The world’s cities are expanding at a pace that is reshaping economies, politics and everyday life. But behind the impressive statistics on urban growth, can governments build cities that work for the people arriving in them? Here lies a more complicated problem.
The transformation is striking. In 1950, only about 2.5 percent of the world’s urban population lived in megacities. By 2020, that share had climbed to 16.4 percent. The rise reflects a broader migration from rural communities toward urban centres in search of employment, education, healthcare, infrastructure and greater economic security. Yet urbanization is not simply a story of opportunity. It is also a story of pressure.
As populations concentrate in large metropolitan areas, housing becomes more expensive, public transport more crowded, waste systems overstretched and environmental risks more difficult to manage. For low-income residents, the promise of the city can quickly become a struggle for affordable housing, decent work, clean water and physical security. In this story, Asia leads the urban growth race.
The scale of the transformation is mostly visible in Asia. The latest United Nations urbanization estimates place Jakarta at the top of the global urban-agglomeration rankings in 2025, with about 41.9 million residents, followed by Dhaka at roughly 36.6 million and Tokyo at 33.4 million. Delhi, Shanghai, Cairo, São Paulo, Mexico City, Mumbai and Beijing complete the leading group. Nine of the world’s ten largest urban agglomerations are in Asia, with Cairo providing the major African representation.
However, the figures require careful interpretation. The United Nations introduced a new geospatial methodology in 2025 that measures continuously built-up urban areas differently from many traditional city boundaries. That means some apparent changes in rankings, echo how cities are measured as well as how rapidly they are growing. This distinction matters because megacities are progressively extending beyond conventional municipal borders. A worker may live in one administrative area, work in another and depend on infrastructure controlled by several different authorities. The result is a governance problem, as much as a demographic one.
The human cost of urban concentration to millions of migrants and rural families, is that the city remains an economic lifeline. Metropolitan areas congregate employers, universities, hospitals, financial institutions and markets in their enclaves. They can create opportunities that smaller communities cannot provide. But economic growth does not automatically translate into better living conditions, anyways.
In rapidly expanding cities, formal housing construction often fails to keep pace with population growth. Informal settlements consequently become part of the urban landscape, frequently occupying land vulnerable to flooding, landslides or pollution. Another aspect of it, is transportation. Transport provides another dividing line. Wealthier residents can live in planned neighbourhoods regardless of distance, with reliable roads and private mobility, while poor residents/workers may spend hours commuting from peripheral settlements to employment centres.
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