IB Geography G.1.1 Characteristics of Urban Places Notes

Jakarta Ranks First Among the World's Cities in the 2025 United Nations Count

1. The World Urbanization Prospects released by the United Nations Population Division on 18 November 2025 puts Jakarta first, at nearly 42 million residents.
2. The same release puts Dhaka second at nearly 37 million and Tokyo third at 33 million.
3. That release counts 33 megacities in 2025 against 8 in 1975, on a lower limit of 10 million inhabitants.
4. Indonesia's Law No. 3 of 2022 named a new capital, Nusantara, on the island of Borneo.
5. On 12 May 2026 the country's Constitutional Court held that Jakarta stays the capital until a presidential decree transfers the seat.
6. So the largest city in the world holds its rank by a statistical method settled in 2025 and its capital status only because the decree that would move it is still unsigned.

Singapore Sits on an Island Its Government Has Been Enlarging Since the 1960s

1. Singapore's national land area was 581.5 square kilometres in 1960 and 744.3 square kilometres in 2025 on the series published by its Department of Statistics.
   1. Figures up to 2001 count approved land lots, while figures from 2002 count land owned parcels, so the two ends of that series rest on different accounting.
2. An account published by Singapore's National Library Board in 2017 puts the land reclaimed between 1965 and 2015 at 13,800 hectares, which is 138 square kilometres.
3. A site can therefore be manufactured, so it sets what is cheap and what is dear to build without settling what the city becomes.

A City's Function Is a Claim About What It Mostly Does at a Given Date

1. The function of a settlement is the work it does for its own residents and for the places around it.
2. Classification by dominant function sorts cities by the work that occupies most of their people, ground or revenue.
3. Port Cities
   1. The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore reported container throughput of 44.66 million twenty-foot equivalent units for 2025 in its release of 13 January 2026.
   2. Vessel arrivals that year reached 3.22 billion gross tonnage, a measure of ship capacity rather than of cargo weight.
4. Administrative Capitals
   1. Nigeria created the Federal Capital Development Authority under Decree No. 6 of 1976 and charged it with building a new capital at Abuja.

Single-Function Towns Exist Because One Resource or One Investor Dominates

1. Single-Industry Towns
   1. Kiruna in northern Sweden was laid out beside the iron ore body worked by LKAB, which the Swedish state has owned outright since 1976.
2. Resort Cities
   1. Mexico laid out Cancún on a near-empty coast from 1970, with its first hotel open in September 1974 and three hotels holding 1,322 rooms by the end of that year.
   2. The national tourism fund FONATUR was created in 1974 to plan what Mexico called Integrally Planned Centres.

Land Use Records What Occupies the Ground, One Class at a Time

1. Land use is a classification of ground by the activity carried on it, so most schemes separate a central business district, residential ground, industrial ground, transport land and open space.
2. Land cover is the physical material at the surface, whether water, grass, trees, bare soil or hard roofing.
   1. A cover class cannot be read as a use class, because one hard roof can cover a factory, a school or a home.

Singapore's Largest Land-Use Entry Is a Residual Class

1. Singapore's published allocation for 2020 divides 73,800 hectares on the planning authority's land-take accounting, which is 738 square kilometres against the 728.3 recorded as land that year.
   1. Housing takes 10,400 hectares, industry and commerce 9,100, and land transport infrastructure 8,400.
   2. Parks and nature reserves take 6,900 hectares, community, institution and recreation facilities 4,600, and utilities 2,100.
   3. A residual class called Others takes the remaining 32,300 hectares.
2. That residual is the largest single entry in the table, at 43.8 percent of the total.
3. Ground that fits no class is swept into the remainder, so the class list decides what a land-use map is able to show.

Settlements Rank by Size and by the Services They Can Keep in Business

1. A settlement hierarchy orders settlements by population and by the number and rarity of the functions they hold.
2. The mechanism under that order is a pair of quantities attached to every good and every service.
3. The threshold of a good or service is the minimum population needed to keep it trading in one place.
4. A bakery has a low threshold and a short range, so a village can support one.
5. A cardiac surgery unit has a high threshold and a long range, which is why one unit serves a whole region from a single site.

1. Low-order goods repeat at every level of the hierarchy, so a capital city sells bread as readily as a hamlet does.
2. High-order goods appear only where the threshold is met, which is what keeps the upper levels of the hierarchy few.

Christaller Derived the Hierarchy From a Set of Stated Assumptions

1. Walter Christaller set out central place theory in Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland in 1933, working from the settlements of southern Germany.
2. He placed his central places on a Euclidean, isotropic plane carrying the same purchasing power in every direction.
3. He assumed a transport network serving every part of that plane equally and consumers who buy from the nearest central place offering the good.
4. On those assumptions the theory yields a nested hierarchy in which each level holds functions the level below cannot support.

The Megacity Rung Was Redrawn Between the 2018 and 2025 Editions

1. The 2018 revision ranked Tokyo first with an urban agglomeration of 37 million, which that edition defines as contiguous territory inhabited at urban levels of residential density.
2. That edition put Delhi second at 29 million and projected 43 megacities by 2030.
3. The 2025 revision counts settlements by the Degree of Urbanization, a grid method that the United Nations Statistical Commission endorsed at its 51st session in March 2020.
4. A city under that method is a run of contiguous grid cells holding at least 1,500 inhabitants per square kilometre, with at least 50,000 people in the run.
5. The 2018 revision tabulated settlements of 300,000 inhabitants or more, each urban by its own country's criteria, while the 50,000 of the 2025 grid is written into the definition of a city.
6. The 2025 edition counts 33 megacities in 2025, 19 of them in Asia, and projects 37 by 2050 on the grid definition, so its count cannot be set against the 43 the 2018 edition projected.

Planned Growth Begins with a Drawing Made Before Anyone Arrives

1. A planned growth process lays out streets, plots and services before the residents arrive, on authority from a statute, a decree or a state competition.
2. Brasília, from 1957
   1. Lúcio Costa's Plano Piloto won the national competition Brazil ran for the new capital in 1957.
   2. Oscar Niemeyer designed the buildings, which went up in time for the inauguration on 21 April 1960.

Spontaneous Growth Puts the Houses up Before the Pipes Go In

1. A spontaneous growth process builds dwellings on ground that has not been surveyed, allocated or serviced for them.
2. The order of events is the definition, because the houses come first and the streets take their shape from what is already standing.

Jakarta's Kampungs Grew Inside the City That Now Surrounds Them

1. A kampung is the urban form of a rural village, a dense block of one-storey and two-storey houses laced by a footpath network that no plan drew.
2. Dian Tri Irawaty's 2018 UCLA thesis on Jakarta's kampungs records 7,200 hectares of the city's 12,000 hectares as kampung in the 1960s, about 60 percent of its area.
   1. That figure is a share of area, so it says nothing directly about the share of people who lived there.
3. Many kampung households hold hak girik or hak garapan, quasi-legal titles that the national land agency acknowledges without conferring ownership.

Brasília's Most Populous District Is One the Plano Piloto Never Drew

1. The workers who built the planned capital lived in camps and squatter settlements inside the Federal District, on ground the drawing had never allocated to them.
2. On 27 March 1971 the authorities opened Ceilândia, whose name comes from the Campanha de Erradicação de Invasões, the campaign to eradicate invasions.
3. Codeplan, the Federal District's planning body, puts the transfer at about 82,000 residents, from Vila do IAPI, Vila Tenório, Vila Esperança, Vila Bernardo Sayão Colombo and Morro do Querosene.
4. Ceilândia became a formal administrative region on 25 October 1989, eighteen years after the first removals.
5. The 2021 household survey of the Federal District counted 350,347 urban residents in Ceilândia, still the most populous of its administrative regions.
6. Both the Plano Piloto and Ceilândia stand on the same plateau, so the difference between a drawn city and a removal town is one of decision, money and law.