When 20% of your total population lives in one city, you’re gunna have a bad time
Today, I pulled some figures from the internet (*cough, Wikipedia*) and did a really simple series of graphs showing population size of the 30 largest cities in Europe, the United States, and Australia as a percentage of total population.
Scaled to a common maximum of 25%. Here they are:
One of these things is not like the other.
The motivation for this was a conversation I’ve been having with colleagues recently about relative population size in Australian cities, as a way of thinking about and describing their seeming dysfunctionality in a whole range of areas — from the function of local governments, to transport, to housing cost.
Given the stark differences shown up in these graphs, there does seem to be something there worth further investigation.
Disclaimer: I have in no way verified this data beyond pulling it from Wikipedia, and there are undoubtedly issues with accuracy, comparisons, etc. One obvious point of weirdness is the Australian dataset showing Canberra and the ACT separately (because the Canberra-Queanbeyan agglomeration falls across a state border). The trend is the interesting thing, not the exact figures.
