[Young journalist Seoyoon Jung] According to current estimates, the City of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, is the largest city, with 42 million people, in the world based on population estimates.

On December 26th (in local time), the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) published a report called "World Urbanisation Prospects 2025." The report says that Jakarta is now the city with the most people in the world. It has about 42 million people, which is about 2 million more than Dhaka, the second most populous city with 40 million. Tokyo is in third place with about 33 million people. 

After analyzing population estimates and residential areas for 12,000 cities in 237 countries around the world, the UN DESA found that the only non-Asian city in the top 10 was Cairo, the capital of Egypt.

Only seven years ago, Jakarta’s population was about 10 million, ranking just 33rd among world cities. Indonesia’s total population is now 285 million, the 4th largest in the world. About 15% of  the country’s population lives in Jakarta.

In 1975, there were only eight “megacities” with more than 10 million people, but this number has increased to 33 cities this year, 50 years later. Among them, more than half—19 cities—are in Asia. The UN also said that the populations of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Hyderabad (India), and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) are expected to exceed 10 million in the future, and that the number of megacities will likely increase to 37 by 2050.

The report said that about 45% of the world’s 8.2 billion people now live in cities and that the world is becoming more urbanized. Seventy-five years ago, in 1950, only 20% of the world’s 2.5 billion people lived in cities.

The UN DESA said, “Urbanization is one of the most important demographic changes in human history,” and added that it is “changing the way people live and how communities are formed.”

However, while some megacities continue to grow, many small and medium-sized cities are losing population. Among the cities studied, 81% had fewer than 250,000 people, and most cities except 4% had fewer than 1 million people. As of this year, half of the cities with falling populations were in China (33%) and India (17%).

▶원문 기사:인도네시아 자카르타, 4200만명으로 세계 최대 도시 등극 (이코노미스트, 2025. 11. 27)

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