July-August 2009

The Humane Megacity: Transforming New York's Waterfront

by Rutherford H. Platt

Metropolitan New York is not the world’s largest megacity—an urban region exceeding 10 million inhabitants—but it is the most experienced in the art of coping with being huge. In 1900, the newly consolidated Greater New York of 4.2 million inhabitants ranked second only to Greater London among the top 10 cities; except for Tokyo, the rest were all situated in Europe or North America. Today, the New York urban region is the only survivor of the old industrial West among the present 10 largest urban regions, which otherwise are in East Asia (Tokyo, Jakarta, and Dhaka), India (Mumbai, Delhi, and Calcutta), and Latin America (Mexico City, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires). As the matriarch of the world’s megacities, New York has much experience to share with the later generation of city-regions around the world.

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