Growth Patterns of World’s Cities Since 1950

Urbanization has greatly altered the distribution of world’s cities. We use the 2011 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects, the largest time series city database with most consistent definition, to investigate growth trajectories of world’s cities by major area and city size from 1950 to 2010. We found that while the number of cities has been mushrooming from all corners of the world, the greatest number of cities and the largest cities today are increasingly found in the developing world. Trends in evenness of distribution of city by country are also examined. Cities in developing countries have witnessed a faster growth in latest few decades compared to those of developed countries. Larger cities tended to have a universally greater growth rate than smaller-sized cities for six major areas and selected countries. Population of world cities is getting less evenly distributed in terms of the Pareto coefficient. Japan is a developed country with least evenly distributed population in terms of the Pareto coefficient and primacy indexes. With exception for China and India, cities in developing countries tend to less evenly distributed than cities in most developed countries.