Megacities

A megacity is a city with more than 10 million innhabitans. According to the book "worldwide", there were 10 megacities in 2006. The top three populations were Tokyo (33.4 million), New York (24.1 million) and Mexico City (21.7 million). Living in a country like Norway with approximately 5 million innhabitans, we can't begin to imagine how it would be to live in a city with 6-7 times as many people as we have in our country. According to wikipedia, the density of Tokyo is 5796 innhabitans per km² , while in Norway it's 12,65. That's a crazy differense, and makes us wonder how this affects the enviroment around us.

The graph shows the growth of the urban population from 1800 to 2030. It contains five different pie diagrams that each showes how many procent of the words population live in urban areas. The first diagram shows that in 1800, only 2 % of the worlds population lived in the urban areas. From 1800 to 1950, which is the second diagram, there was a huge growth in urban population. Now there where 30 % who where living in urban areas. In 2000 the number increased again, and this time to 47 %. The last two diagrams are estimated numbers. It is estimated that in 2015, 52 % will live in urban areas, and in 2030, about 60 % of the worlds poulation will live in the urban areas. This statistic is taken from the UB-habitat, BBC.

This is a Graph which shows us the relation between people living in cities and regions in five of the continents of the world. The green part of the column shows the people living in rural areas, while the red shows the amount of people living in urban areas. The whole column shows the total population. The second column on each continent is how the scientists think the population will look like in 2015. The source used is UB- habitat, BBC.

Sources:

http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norge

http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo

Picture:

http://www.google.no/imgres?imgurl=http://www.treehugger.com/new-york-city-nyc.jpg&imgrefurl=http://aratta.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/en-ny-sivilisasjon/&usg=__DLT5vdqh6ltp2t0GL7lEDFgHsV4=&h=332&w=415&sz=67&hl=no&start=0&sig2=D5iIgyQqXg5MPglcUjYK6g&zoom=1&tbnid=6gHtu5ZViC4YwM:&tbnh=131&tbnw=163&ei=rLlLTcvUKsmytAb_qNmyDw&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dnew%2Byork%2Bcity%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dno%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D699%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=252&oei=rLlLTcvUKsmytAb_qNmyDw&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0&tx=91&ty=61

Written by: Nooshin, Eline and Marie.