Contemporary Cities and Industrial Change

In accordance with the United Nations' Demographic Yearbook (1985), there are 147 cities with populations of more than a million people, located in fifty-six countries of the world.1 Table 1 shows those countries having three or more cities with a population greater than a million, and the percentage of each nations's total population accounted for by its large cities. It is evident that, generally, the large cities of the advanced nations have reached the limits of their expansion, while the increase and concentration of the population in the large cities of developing countries and Southern Hemisphere countries continues. According to these statistics, the largest city in the world is Sao Paulo, Brazil, with a population of 10,100,000 persons, followed by Mexico City, Mexico, with a population of 9,200,000 persons. Particularly noticeable in Table 1 is the 47.5 percent of the total population of Australia, which is concentrated in its three largest cities. On the world scale, a total of 370,000,000 persons reside in cities with populations of a million or more—about 8 percent of the total world population. In modern warfare, large cities such as these are indefensible; they can be devastated in war, far more so than was shown in World War II. For this reason, in a world where urbanization has increased to this degree, large-scale warfare is unthinkable. This was the sentiment in 1985 when leaders of nineteen of the world's major cities adopted the "Tokyo Declaration," which declared their intention to associate and cooperate in order to promote the safety and welfare of their citizens by maintaining world peace.2