Neither London, nor New York, nor Tokyo. The largest city in the world is a place that you have never heard

We recently told something we sensed, but there were no data to confirm it. For a long time it was thought that we were 8,000 million people on the planet, but a study calculated that we had left Between 1,000 and 3,000 million along the way. It is not a trivial figure, and gives an idea of ​​the “massification” of people on earth. If we add to this that most live in cities, the thing is complicated a little more. In fact, there is only one city that has two records: it is the bigger and the most populatedand possibly you had never heard of her.

Colossal and unknown. To the question of the world’s largest city, many candidates may be repeated: London, New York, Tokyo… However, none of those well -known cities really holds the title, neither by total nor surface population. No, the true urban giant is found in China and is a name that the general public is unknown: Chongqing.

This monumental metropolis, located in the geographical heart of the country, where the Yangtsé and Jialing rivers cross, has not only become the city with the greater number of inhabitants in its jurisdiction, but also in the most extensive on the planet, with More than 82,400 square kilometersan extension comparable to entire countries such as Ireland or Austria.

Context. However, its real size is not easily perceived from the outside, this occurs especially because much of Its territory is ruraland because its urban structure challenges all cartographic logic, built on steep slopes, deep valleys and high urban platforms that force its residents to move between tunnels, phones, stairs, elevators and catwalks that intersect as in an endless vertical dream.

A three -dimensional city. More than a flat city, Chongqing is a three -dimensional urban phenomenon, as vertical as expansive, as abruptly as unbeatable. In fact, He told the Guardian Architecture critic Oliver Wainwright when describing his experience there Like a mixture Between the Inception movie and a snake and stairs game. In Chongqing, what seems like the ground floor can actually be the roof of a thirty -story building, and moving a few apples can involve changing levels five times.

Its urban design, far from following a classic pattern, Respond to the mountainous topography which forces the neighborhoods clinging to the cliffs since the subway lines cross housing buildings. In such a context, even maps lose meaning: the city is only understood in motion, from within and in all directions.

The Chinese city in dusk

More than an inflated statistic. Plus: Although it may seem that its classification as “the greatest” is based on administrative technicalism, the argument goes beyond the mere surface. While the urban area occupies a much smaller portion of the total, More than 70% of the population (about 33 million inhabitants) lives within that area concentrated, a figure that exceeds any other city in the world.

In addition, Chongqing is not a recent experiment or a planned city overnight: its history goes back to More than 3,000 yearswith a key role as regional capital, strategic river port and even logistics node before the Qing dynasty. The city already had more than two million inhabitants before the economic reforms of 1968 that opened China to the globalized world. From that moment on, growth It was vertiginous: 6.3 million in 1979, 13.9 million in 1983 and almost 29 million in 1997.

The urbanized “China”. If you want too, Chongqing symbolizes the perfect model of Intensive urbanization That China has promoted in recent decades, with a state machinery that has doubled the urbanization rate of the country in twenty years, and that projects to reach 70% of urban population by 2050. Moreover, four of the five largest cities in the world by population within its administrative limits They are today in Chinareflex of a national process that has merged economic development with urban planning on a continental scale.

Within that framework, the enclave not only represents a statistical feat, but a key piece of Chinese economic and territorial gear, a kind of megalopolis built on the basis of public investment, administrative reorganization and forced mobility towards urban poles.

Touching roof. It is the last of the legs to analyze: its future. Like that of many other Chinese cities, he faces a new reality that we have gone counting: Stagnation and posterior Demographic decline of the country. Despite its colossal size and its central role in the economic growth of the nation, it may have already reached its maximum point.

The new generations, less numerous and With other goals and valuesThey could reduce the expansion pressure that its recent history has defined. That said, even if it does not grow anymore, Chongqing will continue to be a unique city: with 33 million people And a territory that covers more than some states and countries combined, the city of impossible heights and asymmetric densities is already, in its own right, one of the most extreme urban expressions that humanity has conceived.

Image | JUUKEIHC, Kristoffer Trolle

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