December 1, 2025

Global urbanization

Nice News - Jakarta — Indonesia’s vibrant, multicultural capital — is now the largest city in the world. The metropolis of nearly 42 million residents has overtaken the longtime title-holder Tokyo, with its population of 33 million, according to a new United Nations report. The Japanese capital now ranks third, with Dhaka, Bangladesh, coming in second with a population of almost 37 million.

The U.N.’s 2025 World Urbanization Prospects report underscores a major shift in global population trends over the past several years. In 2018, the last year the organization updated the report, Jakarta clocked in at 33rd. Even more strikingly, the percentage of the world’s population residing in cities has jumped from 20% in 1950 to 45% today. And the number of megacities, which the U.N. defines as those with 10 million or more residents, has quadrupled from eight in 1975 to 33. More than half of these are in Asia, with Cairo, Egypt, being the only non-Asian metropolis among the top 10 most densely inhabited locales.

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