… In this project, “Metropolis,” I am documenting the megacities of our time — places with populations in excess of 10 million. Every megacity is a theater, and every city has a different stage and different actors.
My question is, how can people live in cities that are so immense? Crowded cities in India like Mumbai and Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta); Dhaka, Bangladesh; Manila; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Karachi, Pakistan, have traffic jams all the time…
Geography graduate student Derek Watkins has some fun with population densities in an interactive version of William Bunge’s The Continents and Islands of Mankind. The above shows areas in the world where there are at least 15 people per square kilometer. In the interactive, a slider lets you shift that number up to 500 where only a few spots in the world remain.
Forty years after the release of the groundbreaking study, were the concerns about overpopulation and the environment correct?
NPR’s clever illustration of how the world’s population grew to seven billion people uses test tubes and colorful liquids. The video was produced by Adam Cole with cinematography by Maggie Starbard.
Projected population growth - Africa 1990 - 2090. On the low end of projections, four countries, Malawi, Niger, Tanzania, and Zambia, are expected to grow 1,000%. High growth impedes a country’s ability to build capacity to adapt to climate change impacts.
With the population hitting 7bn this month Spanish design house Bestiaro’s has produced this visualisation of the UN population data for us using its Impure design language. Explore the data by clicking on the countries below - all figures in thousands
