Mexico City Keeps Shrinking
Recently, Parade Magazine, a supplement appearing in hundreds of Sunday papers throughout the United States, carried an “Intelligence Report” column on the world’s “Megacities in the Year 2000.”1 Topping the list was Mexico City, which, according to Parade, would have a “projected population” of 25.6 million in the year 2000. Supposedly, this information was based on a “new report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).”
Although Mexico City has long held the title of the “world’s most populous city,” the United Nations (U.N.) has been steadily downsizing its year 2000 estimates of the city’s population for more them a decade. While earlier U.N. estimates in the late 1970s and 1980 had placed the year 2000 population at more than 31 million and 27.6 million,2 respectively, by 1982 the U.N. was projecting the figure at 26.3 million.3
Parade ‘s number of 25.6 million was not obtained from any “new report” of the UNFPA, but was more likely lifted from the report World Urbanization Prospects 1990 of the U.N. Population Division, which three years ago reported that estimate for Mexico City’s year 2000 population. Now, the latest U.N. projection for Mexico City’s population in the year 2010 is just 18.0 million,4 a number that is not only well below Parade’s year 2000 estimate, but actually slightly lower than the 18.1 million people that the U.N. previously had estimated were inhabiting the city in 1985!5
The latest reduction in the estimates of Mexico City’s future population was caused by the release of statistics from Mexico’s 1990 census. Besides a much lower than expected population count of 81.1 million for the nation — population control “experts” had long been flinging about numbers of 87- 88 or even 90 million — Mexico City ‘s population totaled to just 15.3 million.
The U.N. has officially recognized the results of Mexico’s 1990 census and has now dropped Mexico City from first place to fourth, behind Tokyo, Sao Paulo and New York.
Urban and Sub-urban
The U.N. defines an “urban agglomeration” as “the population contained within the contours of contiguous territory inhabited at urban levels of residential density without regard to administrative boundaries.”6 Accordingly, the entire population of all the densely inhabited contiguous territory surrounding a central city is lumped together and imputed to the core city.
In the case of Tokyo, the densely inhabited surrounding area includes the resident populations of such large cities as Yokohama, Kawasaki, Chiba and 84 other cities and towns .7
Each country, however, defines its “urban” area differently. For Japan, an urban population is one of at least 50,000 people, while in Italy towns of 10,000 or more are classified as urban. In the United States communities of only 2,500 people are classified as urban areas, while in Iceland an “urban” community consists of just 200 persons.8 Just a little something to keep in mind the next time you hear dire reports of the world becoming increasingly urbanized.
Philippine Pop Accelerates Again
The curious phenomenon regarding the allegedly accelerating Philippine population growth rate, first commented upon in Popcorn, (PRI Review, vol. 3, no. 5, Sept./Oct. 1993), occurred again in an August 12thUPI wire service story. Previously, over a 7 day period in July, Reuter news service had reported an increase in the Philippine growth rate from 2.35 percent a year to 2.48 percent.
After holding steady at 2.48 percent in a continuing stream of Reuter’s stories about the Philippine’s population — apparently the world is just obsessed with the subject — UPI suddenly tossed off a brand new number: 2.7 percent growth yearly. If UPI is to be believed, the Philippine situation was obviously getting quite serious; a 10 percent acceleration in the population growth rate in just a single month was no small matter.
Of course, all the news stories pointed out the real culprit in this affair: that nasty Catholic Church. If only the Church would keep quiet about the government’s plans to distribute condoms, pills and other forms of contraception, the population growth problem could be solved overnight.
But not to worry. Four days later Reuter solved part of the population problem all by itself in yet another wire story from the Philippines: the population growth rate was again back to “2.48 percent.” Whew!
1 Parade Magazine, supplement to the Washington Post, 29 August 1993, 10.
2 Estimates and Projections of Urban, Rural and City Populations: The 1980 Assessment, U.N. Department of International Economic and Social Development, 61.
3 Estimates and Projections: The 1982 Assessment, 147.
4 Urban Agglomerations 1992, U.N., Department of Economic Development.
5 Estimates and Projections 1982, 146.
6 Urban Agglomerations 1992.
7 Population Today, March 1993, Population Reference Bureau, Washington, DC, 2.
8 Ibid.
