The fastest-growing megacities over the past decade have been primarily in the developing world.
In our last issue, a spirited online conversation around Megacities was brought into the magazine.
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The growth economies of China and India dominate the rest of the list of most rapidly growing megacities.
The tests, says Eichiner, will provide important feedback for BMW's next megacities vehicle, which will debut early next decade.
As I wrote earlier in this Megacities series, the bigger the Global City, the bigger its Global Slum.
India matches Japan with three megacities, but they are all growing much faster.
At the moment Airbus reckons there are 39 "megacities" worldwide whose airports handle more than 10, 000 long-haul passengers a day.
At the same time, some megacities in the low and middle-income world already seem to have reached a point of saturation.
The real winners in the coming decades are likely to be Chinese megacities, and to a lesser extent those in India.
Physicist Geoffrey West with the Santa Fe Institute has even devised a mathematical law to explain the attraction of megacities.
So what do the numbers tell us about the future of megacities?
They constitute now over one third of the population in these megacities.
And they are still on the look out for investors to back the planned PPPs along seven corridors connecting its megacities and soon-to-be megacities.
Once considered the natural domain of megacities and dense urban cores, high-wage business service jobs, largely due to technology, can increasingly be done anywhere.
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China, not surprisingly, has the most megacities of any country, four.
The C1 was ten years ahead of its time, insists Friedrich Eichiner, BMW's board member in charge of brand development and head of the megacities project.
Yet the megacities are where climate migrants are expected to move to, and they are often in the coastal areas most at risk from rising sea levels.
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Latin America is filled with megacities teeming with shanty towns housing unemployed and underemployed workers from the countryside, whose move didn't stop those nations from stalling economically.
U.N. projections to 2025 suggest that the future list of megacities will be dominated by such lower-income cities, with growth primarily in places like Africa and central Asia.
Two-fifths of the world's cities of 1m-10m people, and 15 of the world's 20 megacities, lie on or near a coast, where many are at risk from flooding.
Other rapidly growing megacities are scattered throughout the developing world.
But greater Dhaka has become one of the world's most populous and fastest-growing megacities, driving up the price of land and straining the country's electrical, power and gas systems.
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Evan Browning, a 26-year-old freelance photographer based in New York City, e-mailed me after reading my last post about La Salada in Buenos Aires for the Megacities Blog.
At BMW Chief Executive Norbert Reithofer last year assigned a group of employees to a skunk works effort to develop a new vehicle for megacities--potentially even under a new brand.
Indeed, the possibility that they might crumble to dust seems to be less of a concern than how nations will cope with the rise of so-called "megacities, " cities with populations of more than 10 million.
All across Asia, megacities face similar problems.
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In 1950, the world had exactly two megacities, New York and Tokyo. (A megacity is defined as a metropolitan area of 10 million people or more.) As of 2010, Earth had 23 megacities, 12 of them in Asia.
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At the annual Frankfurt show this year, Audi unveiled not only a hybrid version of the top-of-the-line A8 (to complement the hybrid A6 already announced), but showed off an urban concept battery car that is part of its new effort on adopting mobility to the coming world of megacities.
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