Conrad Hackett 
This is an excellent and fascinating animation of how the 10 most populous cities in the world changed from 1500 to 2018
by @jburnmurdoch
(hang in - it takes a few seconds to begin)
by @jburnmurdoch
(hang in - it takes a few seconds to begin)
dmwcg@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett This is amazing and so surprising!
ceoln
Paul Marques Mota
Steve Simonis
Meredith
Horaz
Iron Curtain (Chiptunes)
They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (Official Music Video)
You're watching the official music video for They Might Be Giants - "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" from the album 'Flood' (1990)Subscribe to the Rhino Chann...
Cardboard Robot@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch And itâs Tokyo taking the lead, Tokyo and Istanbul neck and neck! London in the stretchâŚ. Now a burst from Guangzhou! New York challenging⌠Mexico City around the curve!âŚ.
Stampede Mastodon App@CardboardRobot @conradhackett @jburnmurdoch I did this throughout the whole video. An exciting race.
Paul Botts@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch It seems to be metros, not literally just the core cities.
Catmama đ@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch This is really fascinating! Very interesting that certain cities, such as Beijing have been among the most populous for so long.
Sarah W@conradhackett thanks, that's really interesting and quite surprising
Noob@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch there is a spelling mistake it's Kolkata. For delhi it is not surprising, as many people from different cities migrate there in search of jobs because it is more urbanised.
Everton Zanella Alvarenga@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch actually, SĂŁo Paulo city has about 12 million people. The metropolitan area around it is the region with around 22 million https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/sao-paulo-population
George William HerbertAbout 600 BC a Maya city in Belize, Caracol, was the largest in the world for most of a hundred years: https://caracol.org/ / https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracol
This longer biggest cities video is amazing. https://youtu.be/5RVNsD_WkB8
bubar
@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch It felt like a horse race; I was cheering for NYC thereâŚ
Froo with a View@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett love this! Although really expected Istanbul to hang on into the present - is physically enormous and feels like one of most densely populated places Iâve ever been.
@ijsbrand
Monica Gonzalez-Marquez@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch This is incomplete. Tenochtitlan had a population of about 400,000 in 1500. Then the Spanish came ...
John Burn-Murdoch 
@jburnmurdoch
I wasn't Mexico City, it was Tenochtitlan.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Tenochtitlan
I wasn't Mexico City, it was Tenochtitlan.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Tenochtitlan
Tenochtitlan | History, Population, Significance, & Facts
TenochtitlĂĄn, ancient capital of the Aztec empire. Located at the site of modern Mexico City, it was founded c. 1325 in the marshes of Lake Texcoco. It formed a confederacy with Texcoco and TlacopĂĄn and was the Aztec capital by the late 15th century. Originally located on two small islands in Lake Texcoco, it gradually spread through the construction of artificial islands to cover more than 5 square miles (13 square km). It was connected to the mainland by several causeways. The population in 1519 was estimated to be about 400,000 people, the largest residential concentration in Mesoamerican history. It
@aeryn_thrace Theyâre the same place
@jburnmurdoch Are you kidding me?
They have the same geographic location. Tenochtitlan was the name of the Aztec capital.
Mexico City is the name of the city built by Spanish colonisers on top of the city they ruined, whose building stones they used to build their own.
@aeryn_thrace âthey have the same geographic locationâ is the definition of âthe same placeâ
@jburnmurdoch No, it is not. If you tear down my house and build your own on the ruins of mine, it is no longer my house.
@aeryn_thrace This really isnât that deep
@jburnmurdoch You're blocked. I have no patience to education the wilfully ignorant.
Mark Burton@jburnmurdoch @aeryn_thrace Not quite. Tenochtitlan was the city in the lake. Mexico city (which takes its name from the Mexica, also known as Aztecs) covers a wider area, taking in several former cities and towns, eg. Tacuba, Itzalpalapa....
Maxthedog@aeryn_thrace @conradhackett @jburnmurdoch that chart conveniently forgot all of the pre columbian cities.
JoAnne Nickerson@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch very cool! I worked in the urban sector for almost all my 35 year long World Bank career and this is fascinating!
Summery_Season@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch thatâs really cool!!
Robert Geller@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett Iâm not sure how seriously to take it. You can get arbitrary results for Tokyo, for example, depending on whether you take the inner 23 wards, the Tokyo Metropolitan prefecture, or the giant urban sprawl including surrounding prefectures. Ditto for New York. Ditto for LA. Itâs a fun graphic though.
Dani (She/They)@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch This is really cool and somehow terrifying. The growth rate spike from the 19th century is ridiculous.
Carnifex@conradhackett London sure got busy in the 18 hundreds. Fascinating stuff!
SĂŠrgio Machado@carniscorner @conradhackett true but also represent the city dynamics related to the age period . Lisbon was at top10 around the major earthquake (1755) as a city center for commerce etc. The big migration from Europe to US around 1880. But additional to this boom in population there are also the issue of exodus from countryside to the city.
Awesome animation:)
Awesome animation:)
Sloan S Gregory@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch so fascinating
David Palk#RejoinEU đđŞđşđđ@conradhackett Amazing. Thank you muchly for putting this out here.
A random mastodon user@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch Amazing work!
Robsterthermidor@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch fascinating thanks!
Aaron K.@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch Wow. Now I really want to know why Beijing depopulated
@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch Ah. Ming dynasty collapse
@conradhackett @jburnmurdoch it's also inaccurate. The chart completely ignores the pre columbian city of Tenochtitlan. It had a population at its minimum of 200,000 and more likely 350,000.
@conradhackett @maxthedog It doesnât ignore anything. The data source puts Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) population at 80,000 in 1500 https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/urbanspatial-hist-urban-pop-3700bc-ad2000
@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett there are multiple sources of information. Yours are a mere fraction of what most others are citing.
@conradhackett @maxthedog When youâre plotting data for hundreds of cities over time, itâs best to use one source for all data points, to keep definitions consistent. The source here was a careful academic analysis which itself combined multiple sources for each city. And far from overlooking the pre-Colombian period, the data includes 17 cities from the Aztec, Mayan, Olmec and other pre-C cultures đ
@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett true.
But when multiple sources who are all trustworthy do the same thing I tend not to trust the outlier.
@maxthedog @conradhackett I hear you, but the problem there is youâre equating quantity with quality. In this instance the general pattern is that estimates made closer to the time (i.e essentially little more than guesses, made before any modern methods were available) were larger, but as time went on and people had access to more and better information, they were revised further and further down, now converging around 75-80,000.
@conradhackett @maxthedog Thereâs loads of fascinating stuff on the various conflicting estimates for Tenochtitlan and the way different methods can produce such different figures, but the best estimates today put it at around 70-80,000 at its peak. So a huge and highly developed city, and still larger than any Spanish city at the time https://www.bigredhair.com/blog/tenochtitlan/
@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett keep in mind that Cortez describes Tenochtitlan as a modern (for its time) fully built out planned city. It was constructed in the middle of a lake on swampy islands so it would be fairly dense. At 14 Square kilometers a density of 15,000 per km would give it a population of 210,000. That's comparable to modern San Francisco with its parking lots, roads, industrial sections, and vacant land. Your estimate would leave it less dense than a modern suburb.
@maxthedog @conradhackett Sorry, but this is getting a bit tedious.
1) Iâve not made any estimate. Iâm using the best estimate from academic researchers
2) Youâre applying SFâs pop density per square *mile* (~15,000) to Tenochtitlanâs area in square *kilometres*. So you need to divide your 210,000 by 2.6, hence 80,000
3) Almost all residential buildings in SF are multi-storey; vs none in Tenochtitlan
Weâre going round in circles but coming back to the same point.
@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett yes I know it's a bit tedious but we're we on Twitter we'd be calling each other nazis by now.
My entire argument is that there are multiple "reliable sources" and they all differ on their estimates. The numbers you're quoting are an outlier that doesn't match contemporary accounts.
@maxthedog @conradhackett Sorry but thatâs just not how this works. When modern methods (which you yourself have agreed are reasonable, but you then mixed miles and kms â a totally understandable slip, but a slip nonetheless) demonstrate that essentially all of those earlier estimates were not physically plausible, then itâs a case of out with the old, in with the new. Updating things based on newer and better methods is great!
@conradhackett @maxthedog And we really shouldnât be surprised that contemporaneous accounts were wrong. We see this right throughout history, and even today! People are not very good at estimating large numbers, be that crowd sizes or city sizes, and thereâs a natural human tendency to exaggerate upwards, especially when weâre talking about as astonishing a sight as Tenochtitlan evidently was to the invading Spanish.
@conradhackett @maxthedog Thatâs what makes turning to smart examples of lateral thinking like âwell how many people could reasonably fit into that area given what we know about maximum plausible densityâ so ingenious. And of course the real tragedy here is that the destruction of such an amazing monument to pre-Colombian civilisation was so complete that we canât rely on conventional archaeological methods.
@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett and let's not forget that most people know next to nothing of ancient history outside of Rome and Egypt. Ask the typical person to name a major civilization and you are extremely unlikely to hear about the Maya, Toltec, Cahokia, Benin, or Mesopotamia.
@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett if Tenochtitlan had the population density of ancient Rome (73,000/km) it would have been over a million people. That seems absurdly too high but even if we place density at a fifth as much still gets it to over 200,000 people.
@jburnmurdoch @conradhackett then keep in mind that a contemporary count of residences in Tenochtitlan by Francisco Aguilar was over 100,000. In addition Fray Juan Torquemada in the late 1500s estimated that Aztec households were between 4 to 10 people.
Even if the residence count was inflated by double that would still leave the city with a population of 200,000 on the low end.
These are contemporary sources from beaurocrats who's job was to be accurate.
Even if the residence count was inflated by double that would still leave the city with a population of 200,000 on the low end.
These are contemporary sources from beaurocrats who's job was to be accurate.