
China’s Pearl River Delta overtakes Tokyo as world’s largest megacity - protomyth
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/china-pearl-river-delta-overtake-tokyo-world-largest-megacity-urban-area#
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ascorbic
They managed to write an article comparing the populations of the Pearl River
Delta and Tokyo without actually giving the population of either. Nice work.

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notauser
They've also picked a photo of downtown Guangzhou on a smoggy day (because all
Chinese cities are polluted, don't you know...)

In actual fact it gets about 10 times fewer smoggy days than Beijing. Still
bad, but I have found the weather to really be quite nice.

The local equivalent of Google Maps is done in an isometric SimCity-style
cartoon format which looks really cool.

[http://gz.o.cn/](http://gz.o.cn/)

Scroll down and to the left a bit to see the area depicted in the photo - it's
a new(ish), central park positioned over a shopping mall.

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impendia
If we're going to compare apples to apples, the Yangtze River Delta (including
Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and other cities, all of which are very close to
each other), is substantially bigger.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta)

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zhemao
Yeah, the article really needs to specify what its definition of "megacity"
is. The YRD is a patchwork of many different cities, towns, and villages, some
parts of which are substantially less urban that others. If you take the train
from Shanghai to Hangzhou, you'll pass by some farmland on the way. I'm sure
the Pearl River Delta is no different.

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vorg
The distances between any 2 of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou on a map looks
far greater than Beijing to Tianjin, or Guangzhou to Shenzhen, so perhaps
Beijing-Tianjin and Pearl River Delta would qualify as urban conurbations in
way that the Yangtze River Delta doesn't.

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zhte415
A fair amount of people commute daily from Tianjin to Beijing, so I think it
is a fair comparison.

The commute (train) takes about 1 hour (per direction, so 2 hours per day),
and is good for people with offices/homes near the terminating station, but
not so good for people that need an additional 1-2 subway rides to their
office.

One hour commute times are pretty typical for largish modern Chinese cities.

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djokkataja
The article doesn't actually mention the population of the Pearl River Delta,
which I find a bit odd... anyway, from Wikipedia:

Population • Metro 63,724,157~120,000,000

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta)

For comparison Tokyo's metro population is 35,682,460.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo)

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blacksmith_tb
That did seem like a strange omission, agreed. Neither is quite what we would
traditionally have called a 'city', though - Tokyo is an entire prefecture
(aka state, or province, depending on how your country divides its regions),
the PRD is a Gibsonesque Sprawl of huge cities and smaller ones. So while I
agree with the general premise that these are the largest urbanized areas in
human history, we will need to revise our terminology to call them cities (or
they'll need to implement a single local government, tax structure, address
and street naming, etc. to fit the exiting definition).

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kokey
It sounds like you refer to the definition as it is in the USA, which is not
exactly the same as it is in the rest of the English speaking world.

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ravitation
The total area of the Pearl River Delta is about 40,000 km^2... The total area
of the Greater Tokyo Area is about 4,000 km^2... Seems like a pretty arbitrary
comparison if you ask me.

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acchow
Of course larger metros will be...well...larger. I don't think the physical
area is meaningful. How about integrated infrastructure, commerce, social
groups, etc?

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ravitation
Of course it's meaningful. Because, due to its size, the Pearl River Delta
contains what are essentially 11 different cities - each with its own city
center. Where as the Greater Tokyo Area includes 6 - all substantially smaller
than, and largely centered around, Tokyo.

Speaking about your other attributes... I think the most telling thing about
the Pearl River Delta is that 2 of those 11 cities were governed by the UK
until 1997 - and you still have to pass through customs and immigration to
cross into and out of them...

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acchow
"each with its own city center" vs "largely centered around Tokyo" is the
answer then - Tokyo is cohesive, PRD is not.

The customs thing is interesting. Citation?

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Taniwha
I don't know about 'citation', but when I crossed from Hong Kong to Shenzhen
last month I had to exit Hong Kong's immigration and enter China's and vice-
versa on the way back.

It's substantially easier to visit Hong Kong than China (visa at the airport
vs. visa in your home country before you travel), unless you have an APEC card
of course

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olalonde
You can also buy (180 rmb for most countries) a 5 day visa for Shenzhen at the
Luohu border too but the visa is not valid for Guangzhou or Dongguan.

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Wogef
The article sort of misses the real issue- the demographic. The PRD is very
young, well educated and highly ambitious. Tokyo has the education, but it
otherwise increasingly stagnant.

New difficulties here in Shenzhen buying the required markers of Chinese
status (cars and houses) mean young Chinese are increasingly interested in
startups and entrepreneurship as an alternative signaling method.

~~~
jpatokal
Why is this getting downvoted? Tokyo's population is projected to peak in 2020
and then go into rapid decline (joining the rest of country, which is already
shrinking fast). The PRD is set to keep growing for at least several decades,
although eventually China will hit the same crunch.

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olalonde
The region is not as tightly integrated as Tokyo though. There's a good chunk
of people who commute daily from Shenzhen to Hong Kong through the electronic
customs but for most people, going in and out of the mainland is not that
simple. The culture on both sides of the border is also very different. It's
only anecdote but a surprisingly high percentage of my friends in Hong Kong
have never set foot in Shenzhen (let alone Guangzhou) and vice versa (I live
in Shenzhen). I've even had friends tell me they were scared of going to
Shenzhen because they don't consider it "civilised" (which is laughable of
course).

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jpatokal
This is a pretty debatable claim, since it depends almost entirely on how you
define what "a" "city" is. By UN stats, the PRD is now the world's largest
"urban area", but Tokyo still retains the top spot as world's largest
"metropolitan area", and by a long shot (37m vs #2 Seoul at 25m).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_cities)

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lucaspiller
I was in Hong Kong last week and one of the things that amazed me is that the
"city centre" (Kowloon and Hong Kong Island) is fairly small and has lots of
green spaces. Hong Kong Island has a density of 16,000/km2 but the actual
urban area is around 20% of the island [0]. Housing really is densely packed
(I haven't ever seen people queuing for an elevator to get into their
apartment building before), but I think I'd much prefer that to living in an
urban sprawl where I have to drive 30 minutes to see something green.

[0]
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hong+Kong+Island,+Hong+Kon...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hong+Kong+Island,+Hong+Kong/@22.2443364,114.1888396,14152m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x3404002b7e463e87:0xe4c58f8e0fb01840)

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meric
I am from Hong Kong and I had relatives in Foshan, and, on a good day, it was
a 4 hour "commute" to visit them, through two sets of customs and 2 to 3
changes of transportation so I'm not sure how they can be counted to be in the
same city.

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tim333
I don't think they are including Hong Kong - at least it's not labelled on the
map.

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meric
Ok. I saw Hong Kong listed in
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta)

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bane
And the inevitable march towards the future we learned about in 90s cyberpunk
gets a little closer. Needing to cross through customs to get between
different parts of what's essentially a contiguous urban area makes this
_just_ a little more salient.

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Retric
I wonder of the US northeast counts as a single megacity.

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mixonic
It is a megalopolis!
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis)

"A megalopolis (sometimes improperly called a megapolis) or megaregion is
typically defined as a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. The term
was used by Patrick Geddes in his 1915 book Cities in Evolution,[1] by Oswald
Spengler in his 1918 book, The Decline of the West, and Lewis Mumford in his
1938 book, The Culture of Cities, which described it as the first stage in
urban overdevelopment and social decline."

vs megacity:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity)

"A megacity is usually defined as a metropolitan area with a total population
in excess of ten million people.[1] A megacity can be a single metropolitan
area or two or more metropolitan areas that converge. The terms conurbation,
metropolis and metroplex are also applied to the latter."

NYC alone is a megacity. The US northeast is a megalopolis.

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derefr
An easy way to tell, I think: a megacity very likely has a single encompassing
public transit authority, because the transit needs of the individual
underlying municipalities involve a lot of "I live in this city, work in that
city, and need to commute every day" and that can't be easily handled if it's
a bunch of separate systems.

The Vancouver Metropolitan Area in British Columbia, for example, is six
cities, with one transit system. There's also the Greater Vancouver Regional
District, which is a megalopolis that consumes a few more adjacent cities, but
those _aren 't_ linked by transit.

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houshuang
This doesn't always work, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), even if you take the
most narrow interpretation, is made up of a bunch of different transit
systems. Walking along on Google Streetview, there is no way you could tell
when on Yonge Street you have "left Toronto", and need to pay extra fare on
TTC, or take YRT/Viva/Blue etc.

But it's a neat idea to think about transit and accessibility. I'd love to
know at which point in the world you can reach the most people within an hour
of transit for example, or two hours... This is the advantage in the Pearl
River Delta (and probably Tokyo) - there is tons of high-speed rail, subways
etc, so you can probably reach about 40 million within 1.5 hr (an hour high
speed rail and half an hour on local transit). Whereas it takes me an hour and
a half just getting to the airport in Toronto.

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curiously
Ask Chinese people if they would live in Tokyo.

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Jack000
not sure what the point is, but there are Chinese people living in Tokyo.
There are about 300 000 Chinese people in Japan, I happen to know a few of
them personally.

