A second megacity region is in the Yangtze River Delta, based around Shangai. This 'Greater Bay Area' has grown from population of only 10m in 1980. In the Pearl River Delta, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Donguan have fused together to create a megacity region of 50m people (60m if Hong Kong and Macau are included). This process has created several of the world's biggest megacity regions, mainly located on the coast, as the economic growth of these cities has been based on manufacturing for exports, business services, and increasingly high-technology industries.
In the last thirty years, China has undergone the largest process of urbanisation in history. A classic example is the northeastern seaboard of the USA, a megalopolis as Gottman termed it, stretching hundreds of miles from Washington through New York City to Boston, with around 50m people. In the early 20th century, geographers observed how rail and road networks were allowing rapidly growing cities to fuse together into vast sprawling conurbations. This is the world's largest agricultural region, supporting a population of around 450 million people in India and 120 million in Bangladesh. This is particularly the case along the Ganges plain in northern India, stretching nearly 2000km from just east of Delhi to Dhaka in Bangladesh. If we zoom in on India (click on links to focus the map), we can see the complexity of rural, peri-urban and urban landscapes, with thousands and thousands of villages, towns and cities in an intricate hierarchy. While India has many of the world's largest cities, it retains a huge rural population of around 900 million people. Both countries have a population of 1.4 billion, with India set to move ahead of China and reach 1.5 billion by 2030.
India: the World's Most Populous CountryĪt the global scale, the world population density map highlights the immense concentration of humanity in India and China. Some introductory highlights from the data are discussed below with links for further information. This website has received 500,000 visitors since 2020, illustrating the widespread interest in global population geography. The GHSL records the complexity and diversity of human settlement, beyond simple rural-urban divisions.
Integrating huge volumes of satellite data with national census data, the GHSL describes in detail the settlement geography of the entire globe, and has applications for a wide range of research and policy related to urban growth, development and sustainability. The data is from the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) 2023 produced by the European Commission JRC and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University. This interactive map shows population density in 2020, measured in residents per square kilometre. Visualising Population Density Across the Globe
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