As it stands, approximately 60% of the 17 million people living there by 2025 will be younger than 18 years old. How Kinshasa develops will certainly be interesting. And it’s getting bigger – by 2100, it’s projected to be the world’s second largest city overall. When people think of the DRC, sprawling metropolises generally aren’t the first things that come to mind.īut Kinshasa, once the site of humble fishing villages, has already likely passed Paris as the largest French-speaking city in the world. It’s just off of Victoria Island, and it is being built on reclaimed land with special measures in place to prevent flooding from global warming. Right now, the city is building Eko Atlantic, a massive new residential and commercial development that is being pitched as the “Manhattan of Nigeria”. The city is already a center of West African trade and finance – but Lagos has ambitious plans to up the ante even further. In any case, this Nigerian metropolis is growing like a weed, and the Global Cities Institute estimates that the city’s population will hit the 88.3 million mark by 2100 to make it the biggest city in the world. The U.N estimated it had 11.2 million people in 2011, and the year after The New York Times said it had at least 21 million inhabitants. In fact, it’s growing so fast, that no one knows how big it actually is. Lagos is already one of the biggest metropolises in Africa, and we previously noted that it was one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The Top Four Megacities of the FutureĪccording to predictions from the Global Cities Institute, these will be the biggest cities in the world in 2100: The most interesting part? None of these cities will be in the Americas, Europe, China, or Australia. In fact, over the next 80 years or so, some cities will literally 10x or 20x in size – turning into giant megacities that have comparable populations to entire countries like modern-day Germany, France, or the United Kingdom. In the future, things will be very different, according to projections from the Global Cities Institute. Metropolises like Moscow, New York, Tokyo, Cairo, or Rio de Janeiro are spread apart with very different geographic and cultural settings, and practically every continent today can claim at least one of the world’s 20 most populous cities.

If you look at a modern map of the world’s most populous cities, you’ll notice that they are quite evenly distributed around the globe.

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays. Animated Map: The Most Populous Cities in the World In Africa Alone, 13 Cities Will Pass NYC in Size

Most populous city in the world