Cities of the world

Background - Famous Cities of the World

Creating lists of the most famous and well-known cities is popular. Often the list is based on the opinion and knowledge of people in a survey. Cities like New York, Los Angeles, London, Rome, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro are common in such lists. More objective lists are produced from the use of official statistics. Ranking cities according to the number of tourists who visit or by the population size of the city are two ways of producing such lists. In tourist visitor numbers, Bangkok, London, Paris, Singapore and New York are the top five global cities. In population total, Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City, New York and Mumbai make the top five.

Cities often appear on top lists for having distinctive featured connected with history, architecture or news reports. Athens with remains of Greek buildings, Venice with canals, Washington DC as the capital of the USA with the White House, and Dubai with stunning modern architecture are famous because of these distinctive features.

Detroit is famous for a different set of reasons

In the mid-20th century, Detroit was described at the 'city of the future'. It was a prosperous and progressive city that had been through a century of rapid growth. Detroit was the home of the "big three" US auto makers - Ford, General Motors (GM) and Chrysler. Being top in America meant these were the top three global auto makers too. These giant Detroit-based companies were famous all over the world. Detroit got nicknames of 'Motor City' and the 'Automotive Capital of the World'. The city also gained fame as the birthplace of Motown Records and Motown music.

Detroit's fame has remained since the 1950s but for all the wrong reasons - it has become a city in decline and freefall, a city that has suffered huge population losses and a city with enormous social and economic problems.

RESOURCE ONE - Left: The Packard Plant in Detroit in its heyday. Right: The Packard Plant today.

Millionaire cities - the world's largest cities

Urban growth (cities getting bigger in size) and urbanisation (an increasing percentage of people living in urban areas) have been features of global population in the last two centuries.

Ancient Rome around 2000 years ago is thought to have been the first city to have more than one million inhabitants. When the power of the Roman Empire declined, so did the population of the city. It was another 1500 years before any city again reached a population of more than one million. During the early 1800s, both Beijing and London did so and they became the first millionaire cities of the modern era.

In 1800, only 3 percent of the world's population lived in cities. Since then things have changed rapidly. By 1900, 12 cities were recorded with populations of more than a million. By 1950, the figure was 83. In 2014, over 400 cities have millionaire status and more than 50 percent of the global population live in cities. Cities with over one million people are found in every continent and most countries have at least one city of millionaire size. In Oceania, Sydney is the largest millionaire city, with a population of more than four and a half million. Auckland is the only New Zealand city on the million-plus list.

The World's Biggest Cities The World's Biggest Cities