AHC: Largest city possible

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out how many people a single contiguous urban area of your choosing can hold. Your minimum is 35 million people, this being the metropolitan population of greater Tokyo.

(The Guangzhou-Hong Kong sprawl has 42 million people, but it's difficult to tell whether it really counts as a single city, since China uses different definitions than the rest of the world and population density is hard to gauge due to the massive itinerant population there.)
 
Assuming global warming doesn't drown it, I'd say the Bengal Delta area when most its population lives in urbanized areas. Bangladesh and West Bengal is already 250 million, so just half of these living in a continuous urban chain of Calcutta, Dhaka, Khulna, Jessore, and who know where else already exceeds the current holders of the Yangtze Delta region.
 
Assuming global warming doesn't drown it, I'd say the Bengal Delta area when most its population lives in urbanized areas. Bangladesh and West Bengal is already 250 million, so just half of these living in a continuous urban chain of Calcutta, Dhaka, Khulna, Jessore, and who know where else already exceeds the current holders of the Yangtze Delta region.

It's a good candidate, but consider that in 1950, the population of Bengal something like 60 million. If this population urbanized sooner, it would probably lower the birth rate, leading to a lower total population by 2012.

Of course, even with this lower birth rate, Bangladesh alone (not even counting West Bengal) would still probably have around 100 million people by now, which would give the Dhaka metropolitan area something like 40 million or more, depending it's degree of primacy.
 
It's a good candidate, but consider that in 1950, the population of Bengal something like 60 million. If this population urbanized sooner, it would probably lower the birth rate, leading to a lower total population by 2012.

Of course, even with this lower birth rate, Bangladesh alone (not even counting West Bengal) would still probably have around 100 million people by now, which would give the Dhaka metropolitan area something like 40 million or more, depending it's degree of primacy.

There would be plenty of cities of 3-5 million most foreigners have never heard of (how many foreigners know about Foshan, Dongguan, or Huizhou?). If the government has integrated the region's infrastructure, Bengal will be seen as a single megacity with dual hubs of Calcutta and Dhaka.

Other good candidates are West Java, the Upper Ganges, and maybe the coast of West Africa between Lagos and Accra.

Yes, and Guangdong and the Yangtze Delta would rank within the top five.
 
I don't think Lagos needs to be AH; just give it a century without a major war and it'll become massive.
 
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