A ‘megacity’ is typically defined as an urban area with over 10 million inhabitants. In 1950, the New York metropolitan area was the only city to meet this criterion. Today, an estimated 1 in 5 people live in one of 27 megacities around the globe – the largest being Tokyo with a population of 36 million [Ref: Slate]. The UN expects this number to have reached 37 by 2025 with the majority of growth coming from an ascendant developing world, particularly Asia [Ref: United Nations]. The general move towards urban living – with a projected 60% of the world’s population living in cities by 2030 [Ref: Forbes] – has led some commentators to worry that the future’s megacities will look vastly different to New York, Tokyo or London, resembling Mumbai or Sāo Paulo with their vast slums and associated social, health and environmental problems [Ref: Moscow Times]. Others however suggest that the challenges presented by megacities can be overcome with architectural and technical ingenuity, the economic dynamism of city life and the promise of a better standard of living for all. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is developing the hundred billion dollar King Abdullah Economic City, which although not a mega city in terms of size of population, is an indicator of the trend towards larger urban developments [Ref: BBC News]. In essence, megacities are either dynamic hotbeds of productivity or corrupt and frightening expanses of urban blight.

Cities of slums
In 1971, around 1 in 6 Mumbai residents lived in slums. Today, the slum population stands at around 1 in 2 (8.7 million slum-dwellers in a population of 18.5 million) [Ref: Times of India]. This is not unique to Mumbai; many megacities in Asia, Africa and South America have vast populations living in slums with little or no government provision for essential infrastructure like sanitation, electricity, safe transport links and education.  In the eyes of some researchers, the widespread belief in “gigantism for its own sake” [Ref: Forbes] is unnecessarily forcing millions to live in unpleasant conditions that cause and exacerbate common health problems like high rates of disease, lower than average life expectancies, epidemics and even pandemics of communicable diseases [Ref: NEJM]. Why, they ask, should emerging megacities tragically repeat the worst mistakes of mass urbanisation that once occurred in the West? While even the most ardent of advocates for megacities recognise that sprawling, unplanned developments may look chaotic to a planner’s eye, hopeful observers argue that the challenge of large, concentrated urban populations will not lead to poverty, but to innovative solutions. These commentators often celebrate the ‘DIY spirit’ of slums that are “improved steadily and gradually by their residents” [Ref: Prospect]. They suggest that complex and constantly changing megacities demonstrate daily how improvements to the living conditions of slum-dwellers are not only possible but inevitable. Many look to China where the number of urban slum-dwellers fell by 25% from 2000-2008 [Ref: spiked] and where planning and investment is allowing the country to build the world’s largest megacity in the Pearl River Delta – not as a single sprawl, but as a cluster of separate, inter-connected urban hubs [Ref: Atlantic]. Some research has also raised doubts over the evidence that living in a smaller city will necessarily improve one’s quality of life [Ref: Vox].

Lure of the city
For these advocates poverty in the developing world’s megacities is not the fault of geographical factors like size and scale but are the result of endemic political corruption and decades of poor planning. While conditions in the slums may admittedly be terrible they are often better than the areas migrant workers left behind offering a first step in the climb out of poverty [Ref: Economic Times]. As American economist, Edward Glaeser, suggests, there are both social and economic advantages to city life: “slums don’t make people poor, they attract poor people who want to be rich”, he says [Ref: Forbes]. The economic sense of megacities – offering the prospect of more jobs, better wages, cheap access to labour-saving ‘mod-cons’ that once were the preserve of the rich – has further contributed to their appeal. Accordingly, the United Nations are clear on the developmental benefits of city living finding that education, healthcare and other services can be easily distributed amongst those in dense areas [Ref: United Nations]. For these reasons recent protests in Turkey, Brazil, Africa and across the Middle East have been described as particularly urban movements reflecting the aspirations of a new, well educated and growing middle class [Ref: Financial Times]. However, as critics of megacities point out, political representation in the developing world often struggles to keep up with the size, transformation and population growth of modern metropolises [Ref: Business Daily] producing more potentially explosive inter-city tensions than solidarities [Ref: Foreign Policy]. Megacities in the developing world are undoubtedly more unstable and certainly more unpredictable that their counterparts in the Western world. In return for the promise of a better life, can the concentration of power in sprawling cities do anything but politically exclude and economically impoverish the countryside that surrounds them [Ref: Global Asia]? Research by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that bloated urban behemoths may become a drag on emerging economies [Ref: Economist] while investment flows towards more secure and manageable medium-sized cities [Ref: Daily Nation]. If they are right, the future of megacities might look more like a poverty trap absorbing the aspirations of the poor while mostly benefitting the rich [Ref: New Statesman].