Curated playlist
Megacities
- LahoreLahore is a city that has been conquered, sacked, and rebuilt more times than almost any other on the subcontinent. Its origin reaches back into antiquity, with people living on its ground for roughly two millennia. Yet no definitive…
- OsakaOsaka sits at the meeting point of rivers, sea lanes, and centuries of ambition. With an estimated population of 2,816,247 as of the 1st of October 2025, it is Japan's third-most populous city, trailing only the special wards of Tokyo and…
- São PauloSão Paulo answers to a Latin motto: Non ducor, duco, which translates as "I am not led, I lead." The phrase fits a city that grew from a hilltop mission of twelve priests into the most populous city in Brazil, in South America, in the…
- BangkokBangkok carries a ceremonial name so long it holds a Guinness World Records entry as the world's longest place name, at 168 letters. It begins Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya and continues far beyond what most…
- LagosLagos sits at the southwest mouth of Lagos Lagoon, protected from the Atlantic Ocean by barrier islands and long sand spits that stretch up to 100 km east and west. Estimates put its population somewhere between 17 and 21 million…
- SeoulSeoul is the only city in South Korea allowed to carry the title special metropolitan city. That status was not inherited. It was declared in a charter the U.S. military government published in an official gazette on the 10th of October…
- WuhanWuhan sits at the exact point where the Han River pours itself into the Yangtze, a meeting of waters that has shaped one of the most consequential cities in Chinese history. On the 31st of December 2019, a report out of this city signaled…
- JakartaGreater Jakarta holds more than 40 million people, making it the most populous urban area in the world. Yet the ground beneath it is dropping. Land subsidence along the northern coast keeps raising the flood risk, and parts of the city…
- Mexico CityMexico City sits at an altitude of 2,240 meters, more than 7,350 feet above the sea, on the high Mexican Central Plateau. It is the most populous city in North America, and the oldest capital city in the Americas. According to the 2020…
- CairoCairo is titled "the city of a thousand minarets," a name earned by its sheer density of Islamic architecture. More than 9.8 million people live within the city itself. Step back to the wider Greater Cairo metropolitan area and the figure…
- Rio de JaneiroRio de Janeiro sits at the entrance to Guanabara Bay, where the shoreline bends east to west near the Tropic of Capricorn, and the city faces largely south toward the open Atlantic. That unusual geography gave it a name built on a mistake:…
- DhakaDhaka holds a distinction that few cities can claim: with an estimated population of 36.6 million, it is the second largest city by population in the world, and is widely regarded as the most densely populated built-up urban area on Earth.…
- JohannesburgJohannesburg was born not from a river, a harbor, or a strategic military post, but from a single geological accident: the discovery of gold. In June 1884, a man named Jan Gerritse Bantjes found the main Witwatersrand gold reef on the farm…
- BeijingBeijing, once romanized as Peking, holds more than 22 million residents, making it the world's most populous national capital. It sits on the northern edge of the North China Plain, with mountains rising on three sides to shield the inland…
- MoscowMoscow holds the second-highest number of billionaires of any city in the world, tied with Hong Kong. It stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, the northernmost and coldest megacity on Earth. More than 13 million people live within…
- LondonLondon stands on the River Thames at the head of a tidal estuary that runs 50 miles down to the North Sea. It has been a major settlement for nearly 2,000 years. Its ancient core, the City of London, was founded by the Romans as Londinium…
- MumbaiMumbai has more billionaires than any other city in Asia. Seven islands once sat here, home to Marathi-speaking Koli fishermen who prayed to a goddess named Mumbadevi. Today those islands have been stitched into one peninsula holding an…
- ParisParis holds 2.04 million people in just 105.4 square kilometres of land. Around that core, a metropolitan population of 13.2 million spreads across the Seine valley. Julius Caesar first wrote of this place in the mid-1st century BC,…
- TokyoTokyo sits at the head of Tokyo Bay, on the central coast of Honshu, yet by 1990 the estimated value of the land beneath the Imperial Palace alone surpassed that of the entire state of California. That single statistic captures something…
- IstanbulIstanbul is the only city in the world that stands on two continents, with about two-thirds of its more than 15 million people living in Europe and the rest in Asia. The Bosphorus splits it down the middle. That strait is one of the…
- DelhiDelhi loses control of nothing more often than its own name. One legend traces it to Dhillu, a king who built a city here in 50 BCE and called it after himself. Another says the Tomaras coined dhili, the Prakrit word for loose, because the…
- New York CityAn estimated 800 languages are spoken in New York City, more than in any other city on earth. That single fact captures something about the place at the southern tip of New York State, where the Hudson River meets one of the world's…
- ChongqingChongqing is the only inland city among China's four direct-administered municipalities, and it carries a name that means a double celebration. The municipality covers a geographical area roughly the size of Austria, with disjunct urban…
- Los AngelesLos Angeles spreads across roughly 469 square miles of land between the Pacific Ocean and the San Gabriel Mountains, and inside that footprint live an estimated 3.87 million people. That makes it the second-most populous city in the United…