The highest city in the world with a population of more than one million is La Paz. The Capital of Bolivia sits ***** meters above sea level, and is more than 1,000 meters higher than the second-ranked city, Quito. La Paz is also higher than Mt. Fuji in Japan, which has a height of 3,776 meters. Many of the world's largest cities are located in South America. The only city in North America that makes the top 20 list is Denver, Colorado, which has an altitude of ***** meters.

Source

The data file is from https://simplemaps.com/data/world-cities.

All cities with a population > 1000 or seats of adm div (ca 80.000)Sources and ContributionsSources : GeoNames is aggregating over hundred different data sources. Ambassadors : GeoNames Ambassadors help in many countries. Wiki : A wiki allows to view the data and quickly fix error and add missing places. Donations and Sponsoring : Costs for running GeoNames are covered by donations and sponsoring.Enrichment:add country name

Mogadishu in Somalia led the ranking of cities with the highest population density in 2023, with ****** residents per square kilometer. When it comes to countries, Monaco is the most densely populated state worldwide.

The World Cities Culture Forum, established in 2012, is a leading global network of civic leaders from over 40 creative cities across six continents, representing a combined population of over 245 million. The forum fosters collaborations to place culture at the core of urban development, addressing 21st-century challenges such as climate change, affordable workspaces, cultural tourism, and diversity in public spaces. Through its Global Summit, partnerships, and programs like the Leadership Exchange Programme and Digital Dialogue Masterclasses, the forum promotes cultural integration in city planning. The World Cities Culture Report 2022 provides comprehensive open-source data on culture, including over 60 datasets from 40 cities. Contextual Data: Includes demographics such as characteristics of the overall and working-age populations (including percent who were foreign born) and of the geographical area, such as the percentage of national population living in the city and the percentage of the area devoted to parks and other public green spaces. Cultural Infrastructure: Provides counts (and rates) of various facilities and venues, including art galleries, artists' studios, rehearsal spaces, bars, bookshops, cinemas, community centers, concert halls, museums, nightclubs, libraries, video game arcades, and theatres. Participation and Tourism: Focuses on cultural participation metrics, such as cinema and theatre admissions, festival attendance, museum visits, average daily attendance at the top five art exhibits, and international tourist numbers. Creative Economy: Encompasses data on book publishing, creative industries employment, film festivals, restaurant ratings, and performances. Education: Includes statistics on public library book loans, higher education levels, international student enrollment, and specialist institutes in art and design education. The source for each number is identified within the dataset. Data users can freely download selected datasets as .csv files.

In 2025, Pietermaritzburg in South Africa ranked as the world's most dangerous city with a crime rate of 82 per 100,000 inhabitants. Five of the 10 cities with the highest crime rates worldwide are found in South Africa. The list does not include countries where war and conflict exist. South Africa dominates crime statistics When looking at crime rates, among the 10 most dangerous cities in the world, half of them are found in South Africa. The country is struggling with extremely high levels of inequality, and is struggling with high levels of crime and power outages, harming the country's economy and driving more people into unemployment and poverty. Crime in Latin America On the other hand, when looking at murder rates, Latin America dominates the list of the world's most dangerous countries. Violence in Latin America is caused in great part by drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and gang wars.

Population in the largest city (% of urban population) in World was reported at 16.05 % in 2024, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. World - Population in the largest city - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on July of 2025.

The "Major Cities" layer is derived from the "World Cities" dataset provided by ArcGIS Data and Maps group as part of the global data layers made available for public use. "Major cities" layer specifically contains National and Provincial capitals that have the highest population within their respective country. Cities were filtered based on the STATUS (“National capital”, “National and provincial capital”, “Provincial capital”, “National capital and provincial capital enclave”, and “Other”). Majority of these cities within larger countries have been filtered at the highest levels of POP_CLASS (“5,000,000 and greater” and “1,000,000 to 4,999,999”). However, China for example, was filtered with cities over 11 million people due to many highly populated cities. Population approximations are sourced from US Census and UN Data. Credits: ESRI, CIA World Factbook, GMI, NIMA, UN Data, UN Habitat, US Census Bureau Disclaimer: The designations employed and the presentation of material at this site do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

Postal: Business Volume: Year to Date: Express: Guangxi: Nanning data was reported at 251.599 Unit mn in Mar 2025. This records an increase from the previous number of 159.184 Unit mn for Feb 2025. Postal: Business Volume: Year to Date: Express: Guangxi: Nanning data is updated monthly, averaging 101.584 Unit mn from May 2013 (Median) to Mar 2025, with 130 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 940.000 Unit mn in Dec 2024 and a record low of 2.948 Unit mn in Jan 2014. Postal: Business Volume: Year to Date: Express: Guangxi: Nanning data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by State Post Bureau. The data is categorized under China Premium Database’s Transportation and Storage Sector – Table CN.TK: Express: Business Volume: By City (Top 50 Cities).

This world cities layer presents the locations of many cities of the world, both major cities and many provincial capitals.Population estimates are provided for those cities listed in open source data from the United Nations and US Census.

This statistic displays the countries with the greatest range between their highest and lowest elevation points. China and Nepal share the highest elevation point worldwide, which ascends to an amount of 8848 meters above sea level. Near the city Turpan Pendi, Xinjiang, China's elevation reaches 154 meters below sea level.

Context

This is a dataset of the most highly populated city (if applicable) in a form easy to join with the COVID19 Global Forecasting (Week 1) dataset. You can see how to use it in this kernel

Content

There are four columns. The first two correspond to the columns from the original COVID19 Global Forecasting (Week 1) dataset. The other two is the highest population density, at city level, for the given country/state. Note that some countries are very small and in those cases the population density reflects the entire country. Since the original dataset has a few cruise ships as well, I've added them there.

Acknowledgements

Thanks a lot to Kaggle for this competition that gave me the opportunity to look closely at some data and understand this problem better.

Inspiration

Summary: I believe that the square root of the population density should relate to the logistic growth factor of the SIR model. I think the SEIR model isn't applicable due to any intervention being too late for a fast-spreading virus like this, especially in places with dense populations.

After playing with the data provided in COVID19 Global Forecasting (Week 1) (and everything else online or media) a bit, one thing becomes clear. They have nothing to do with epidemiology. They reflect sociopolitical characteristics of a country/state and, more specifically, the reactivity and attitude towards testing.

The testing method used (PCR tests) means that what we measure could potentially be a proxy for the number of people infected during the last 3 weeks, i.e the growth (with lag). It's not how many people have been infected and recovered. Antibody or serology tests would measure that, and by using them, we could go back to normality faster... but those will arrive too late. Way earlier, China will have experimentally shown that it's safe to go back to normal as soon as your number of newly infected per day is close to zero.

https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/kaggle-user-content/o/inbox%2F197482%2F429e0fdd7f1ce86eba882857ac7a735e%2Fcovid-summary.png?generation=1585072438685236&alt=media" alt="">

My view, as a person living in NYC, about this virus, is that by the time governments react to media pressure, to lockdown or even test, it's too late. In dense areas, everyone susceptible has already amble opportunities to be infected. Especially for a virus with 5-14 days lag between infections and symptoms, a period during which hosts spread it all over on subway, the conditions are hopeless. Active populations have already been exposed, mostly asymptomatic and recovered. Sensitive/older populations are more self-isolated/careful in affluent societies (maybe this isn't the case in North Italy). As the virus finishes exploring the active population, it starts penetrating the more isolated ones. At this point in time, the first fatalities happen. Then testing starts. Then the media and the lockdown. Lockdown seems overly effective because it coincides with the tail of the disease spread. It helps slow down the virus exploring the long-tail of sensitive population, and we should all contribute by doing it, but it doesn't cause the end of the disease. If it did, then as soon as people were back in the streets (see China), there would be repeated outbreaks.

Smart politicians will test a lot because it will make their condition look worse. It helps them demand more resources. At the same time, they will have a low rate of fatalities due to large denominator. They can take credit for managing well a disproportionally major crisis - in contrast to people who didn't test.

We were lucky this time. We, Westerners, have woken up to the potential of a pandemic. I'm sure we will give further resources for prevention. Additionally, we will be more open-minded, helping politicians to have more direct responses. We will also require them to be more responsible in their messages and reactions.

Due to rapid urbanization over the past 20 years, many newly developed areas have lagged in socio-economic maturity, creating an imbalance with older cities and leading to the rise of "ghost cities". However, the complexity of socio-economic factors has hindered global studies from measuring this phenomenon. To address this gap, a unified framework based on urban vitality theory and multi-source data is proposed to measure the Ghost City Index (GCI), which has been validated using various data sources. The study encompasses 8,841 natural cities worldwide with areas exceeding 5 km², categorizing each into new urban areas (developed after 2005) and old urban areas (developed before 2005). Urban vitality was gauged using the density of road networks, points of interest (POIs), and population density with 1 km resolution across morphological, functional, and social dimensions. By comparing urban vitality in new and old urban areas, we quantify the GCI globally using the theory of urban vitality for the first time. The results reveal that the vitality of new urban areas is 7.69% that of old ones. The top 5% (442) of cities were designated as ghost cities, a finding mirrored by news media and other research. This study sheds light on strategies for sustainable global urbanization, crucial for the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

The code file gives the calculation process of data respectively, and the excel file gives the obtained data.

Ref: Zhang, Y., Tu, T., & Long, Y. (2025). Inferring ghost cities on the globe in newly developed urban areas based on urban vitality with multi-source data. Habitat International, 158, 103350. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2025.103350

This global accessibility map enumerates land-based travel time to the nearest densely-populated area for all areas between 85 degrees north and 60 degrees south for a nominal year 2015. Densely-populated areas are defined as a contiguous area with 1,500 or more inhabitants per square kilometre or a majority of built-up land cover types coincident with a population centre of at least 50,000 inhabitants.This dataset is described in "Mapping inequality in accessibility: a global assessment of travel time to cities in 2015" (Weiss et al 2018; doi:10.1038/nature25181)This map was produced through a collaboration between MAP (University of Oxford), Google, the European Union Joint Research Centre (JRC), and the University of Twente, Netherlands.The underlying datasets used to produce the map include roads (comprising the first ever global-scale use of Open Street Map and Google roads datasets), railways, rivers, lakes, oceans, topographic conditions (slope and elevation), landcover types, and national borders. These datasets were each allocated a speed or speeds of travel in terms of time to cross each pixel of that type. The datasets were then combined to produce a "friction surface"; a map where every pixel is allocated a nominal overall speed of travelbased on the types occurring within that pixel. Least-cost-path algorithms (running in Google Earth Engine and, for high-latitude areas, in R) wereused in conjunction with this friction surface to calculate the time of travel from all locations to the nearest (in time) city. The cities dataset used is the high-density-cover product created by the Global Human Settlement Project. Each pixel in the resultant accessibility map thus represents the modelled shortest time from that location to a city.

The hottest average annual temperature recorded at a single location was **** degrees Celsius in Makkah, Saudi Arabia in 2010 and again in 2016. Makkah, also spelled Mecca, sees millions of Muslim enter the city every year. Although 2010 set the record for the hottest year globally on record, the record was then broken several times throughout the following decade. As of 2019, the hottest year on record globally was 2016, followed by 2019.

Smart City & Connected City Solutions Market Outlook

The global market size for Smart City & Connected City Solutions is poised to grow from $520 billion in 2023 to an impressive $1.2 trillion by 2032, exhibiting a robust CAGR of 9.5% over the forecast period. This substantial growth is driven by advancements in IoT technology, increased urbanization, and the rising demand for energy-efficient systems and infrastructure.

One of the primary growth factors for this market is the rapid urbanization across the globe. More than half of the world’s population now resides in urban areas, and this figure is expected to rise exponentially over the coming decades. As cities grow, the strain on infrastructure, energy resources, and governance systems increases, creating a necessity for smarter and more efficient solutions. The integration of IoT and AI technologies into urban planning and management is enabling cities to meet these demands by optimizing resource use, reducing waste, and improving the quality of life for residents.

Another significant driver is the rising governmental and private sector investment in smart city initiatives. Governments worldwide are recognizing the benefits of smart city solutions in terms of energy conservation, better traffic management, enhanced security, and improved public services. For example, the European Union has committed substantial funding for smart city projects under its Horizon 2020 initiative, focusing on sustainability and technological innovation. Similarly, various countries in Asia-Pacific, North America, and the Middle East are launching extensive smart city programs, backed by both public and private investments.

The proliferation of advanced technologies such as 5G, blockchain, and AI is also playing a crucial role in the market's growth. 5G technology, in particular, is set to revolutionize smart city infrastructure by providing faster, more reliable connectivity. This will enable the high-speed data transfer required for real-time applications in smart governance, smart healthcare, and smart mobility. Additionally, blockchain technology offers enhanced security and transparency for various smart city applications, including energy grids, public services, and transportation systems.

The regional outlook for the Smart City & Connected City Solutions market is highly promising, with Asia-Pacific and North America leading the charge. Asia-Pacific is expected to witness the highest growth rate due to the rapid urbanization in countries like China and India and substantial government initiatives focused on building smart cities. North America, with its advanced technological infrastructure and significant investments in smart city projects, is also poised for considerable growth.

Component Analysis

The Smart City & Connected City Solutions market can be segmented by components into hardware, software, and services. Each of these components plays a critical role in the development and implementation of smart city solutions. The hardware segment includes sensors, cameras, smart meters, and other connected devices that form the backbone of smart city infrastructure. These devices collect vast amounts of data, which is crucial for monitoring and managing various urban functions. The increasing adoption of IoT devices is driving the growth of this segment, as cities aim to become more efficient and responsive.

Software solutions are essential for analyzing the data collected by hardware components and transforming it into actionable insights. This segment covers a wide range of applications, including data analytics platforms, urban planning software, and smart governance solutions. The demand for such software is growing as cities seek to harness the power of big data and AI to improve decision-making processes. Cloud-based software solutions have become particularly popular due to their scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, contributing to the overall growth of the software segment.

Services are another vital component of the Smart City & Connected City Solutions market. These services include consulting, system integration, and maintenance services, which are crucial for the successful implementation and ongoing operation of smart city projects. The complexity of integrating various hardware and software components into a cohesive system necessitates specialized expertise. As a result, there is a growing market for service providers who can offer end-to-end solutions, from initial planning and design to implementation and continuous support.<

The World Council on City Data (WCCD) awarded the City of Melbourne a platinum designation for its compliance with ISO 37120 (http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=62436), the world’s first international standard for city indicators. Reporting to the standard allows cities to compare their service delivery and quality of life to other cities globally. The City of Melbourne was one on 20 cities to, globally to help pilot this program and is one of sixteen cities to receive the highest level of accreditation (platinum). \r
Having an international standard methodology to measure city performance allows the City of Melbourne to share data about practices in service delivery, learn from other global cities, rank its results relative to those cities, and address common challenges through more informed decision making. \r
Indicators include: Fire and emergency response; Governance; Health; Recreation; Safety; Shelter; Solid Waste; Telecommunications and Innovation; Transportation; Urban Planning; Wastewater; Water and Sanitation; Economy; Education; Energy; Environment; and Finance.\r
City of Melbourne also submitted an application for accreditation, on behalf of ‘Greater Melbourne’, to the World Council on City Data and this resulted in an ‘Aspirational’ accreditation awarded to wider Melbourne. \r
A summary of Melbourne's results is available here (http://open.dataforcities.org/). Visit the World Council on City Data’s Open Data Portal to compare our results to other cities from around the world.

These data were downloaded from Google Earth Engine. Each csv includes Year Month Day CM Scenario and other columns. CM includes three scenario (historical, ssp245 and ssp585). The scenario involves the parameter (tasmax or tasmin). Other columns means the city ID. The city ID and corresponding city name can be seen in the csv file named UID Abbreviation.csv above and the shapefile of cities were used from the open repository (Chen et al. 2022). This global inventory includes 247 cities within the contiguous US. This can be found at: Chen, B., Wu, S., Song, Y. et al. Contrasting inequality in human exposure to greenspace between cities of Global North and Global South. Nat Commun 13, 4636 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32258-4.


And to select the 50 populous cities, 1 km X 1 km resolution imagery of population by Wang et. al (2022) was used.[Wang, X., Meng, X. & Long, Y. Projecting 1 km-grid population distributions from 2020 to 2100 globally under shared socioeconomic pathways. Sci Data 9, 563 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01675-x]. Based on this, we ranked 50 cities from those 247 US cities found in Chen et al. 2022.

Those data and real names of the cities can be studied from these papers.

Mexico MX: Population in Largest City data was reported at 21,500,251.000 Person in 2017. This records an increase from the previous number of 21,419,976.000 Person for 2016. Mexico MX: Population in Largest City data is updated yearly, averaging 15,225,498.500 Person from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2017, with 58 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 21,500,251.000 Person in 2017 and a record low of 5,479,184.000 Person in 1960. Mexico MX: Population in Largest City data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Mexico – Table MX.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. Population in largest city is the urban population living in the country's largest metropolitan area.; ; United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects.; ;

A list of some key resources for comparing London with other world cities.

European Union/Eurostat, Urban Audit

Arcadis, Sustainable cities index

AT Kearney, Global Cities Index

McKinsey, Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities

Knight Frank, Wealth report

OECD, Better Life Index

UNODC, Statistics on drugs, crime and criminal justice at the international level

Economist, Hot Spots

Economist, Global Liveability Ranking and Report August 2014

Mercer, Quality of Living Reports

PWC, Cities of opportunity

BCG, Decoding Global Talent

Forbes, World's most influential cities

Mastercard, Global Destination Cities Index

Numbeo, Database of user contributed data