GGRA03H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Informal Sector, Urban Sprawl, Quality Of Life
Document Summary
Key concept 1: megacities represent a new urban scale. Population and urbanization projections for the next 40 years are known with relative certainty. Qualitatively different urban form for 5 reasons: pollution, congestion, economy, land values and housing, governance. Megacities: cities with a population greater than 10 million (un definition) Used to be 4 million (1988), 8 million (1993), 10 million (1990) Not such a qualitative difference between 8 and 10 million, but huge difference between 1 and. Rapid growth in # of megacities (2 in 1950, now almost 20) Megacities contain 9% of world urban population, yet responsible for 15% of global gdp. Still growing, predicting to have 27 megacities in 2025. Key concept 2: megacities tend to have particular diseconomies of scale and economies of scale. Megacities create diseconomies such as congestion, pollution, travel times, land costs. But also create economies of scale such as larger markets, larger labour pools, lower per capita infrastructure costs.
