From The Telegraph, November 27:
Indonesia’s capital of Jakarta has overtaken Tokyo as the world’s most populous megacity, with almost 42 million inhabitants.
The dense and sinking city’s dramatic growth has been driven, in part, by mass migration, but largely because of a change in the ways urban populations are counted.
According to the UN’s World Urbanisation Prospects 2025 report, Tokyo, with 33 million people, has now dropped to third, while Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is second with 37 million.
When the report was last published in 2018, Jakarta was listed as 33rd with 11 million people and Tokyo – which includes three neighbouring prefectures – first with 37 million.
The drastic shift in the rankings is mostly the result of a new methodology. UN researchers previously relied on official national statistics which used hugely varied metrics. This time, more consistent criteria was used to categorise cities, towns and rural areas.
For Jakarta, the new method counted 30 million more people living in the city, which spreads along the northwestern coast of the island Java. The previous official national statistics excluded many of the “densely populated communities” that are connected to the city centre, the report said.
Pressure on infrastructure
A huge proportion of the metropolis’s population and workforce live in slums and informal settlements, known as kampungs in Indonesia. Often built within the shadows of skyscrapers, the harsh divide is an indication of the city’s growing economic inequality.The areas often lack access to basic amenities such as clean water, electricity and waste disposal – and their residents had largely been missed by the government’s official count.
The city’s rapid population growth has been fuelled by both rural to urban migration by those looking for better jobs, wages and education as well as informal migration. Indonesia has become a major transit country for those fleeing conflict and instability, including from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Myanmar.
However, Jakarta’s rapid overpopulation has put severe pressure on its infrastructure. It has contributed to a gridlocked city, thick with pollution and harmed by environmental degradation.
The city is sinking as much as 11 inches a year, with some neighbourhoods already below sea level. In 2022, Indonesia began building a new city, Nusantara, in the jungles of Borneo to eventually replace Jakarta....
....MUCH MORE
The building of Nusantara is slow-going. In the meantime Jakarta continues to suck-up groundwater and continues to sink.
Here's the U.N. World Urbanization Prospects 2025: Summary of Results
And the whole package:
World Urbanization Prospects 2025
