The Big Apple: A Megacity- EN

The Big Apple: A Megacity Emalee

New York City located in New York, USA, is a city with a population of about 23,632,772 and is one of the biggest cities in the world. NYC is considered a megacity. What is a megacity and how does it affect New York?

What is a Megacity?

A megacity can be defined as a city or metropolitan area that has a population greater than 10 million people. It can be one or two metropolitan area. As of 2015, there are 35 megacities in the world. The largest ones include Mumbai, Tokyo, Delhi, Seoul, Mexico City, Shanghai, Beijing, São Paulo, Karachi, Jakarta, New York, Osaka and Manila.

Each of these has a population in excess of 20 million people. Some megacities go beyond the 10 million people requirement and some even go beyond 20 million. The country with the most megacities is China, which has 4 megacities compared while the US only has 2. China has Shanghai which has a population of about 25,400,00 and Beijing, which has a population of about 21,650,000. As of 2015, the only two megacities in the United States are Los Angeles and New York. However, Chicago is close behind with a population of about 9,729,825. As it stands New York City is the biggest megacity in the US and being a mega city presents its own kind of challenge.

“New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.”

-Bob Dylan

NYC as a Megacity New York City has a population of about 23,632,772, and this includes all of the metropolitan areas. The actual city of New York has a population of about 8,491,079. New York’s metropolitan area includes 25-counties, the five boroughs of New York City, the two counties in Long Island, and five counties in the lower part of the Hudson Valley, seven counties in northeastern Pennsylvania, and 12 counties in Northern and Central New Jersey. The population of the different neighborhoods in the city of New York City include: Bronx: 1,392,002, Brooklyn: 2,532,645,Manhattan: 1,601,948, , Staten Island: 470,467, Queens: 2,247,848. The populations of all the megacity attracted about 56.5 million visitors to New York City in the year 2014. The visitors include about 12 million international visitors and about 44.5 million domestic visitors.

-Because it is a megacity, New York City attracts many businesses, making it a big tourist spot.

Tourist can find just about anything in NYC, including designer clothes, historical areas, Art and entertainment. New York City attracts many stores, due to how many people visit per year.

Contrary to what you might think, New York City is the greenest city in America. The 843-acre Central Park, the city's most famous park, is actually only the 5th largest which makes this even more of a place people would want to live or visit.

“If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe.” ― Ellen R. Shapiro

Is NYC Safe?

Most people would think that since NYC has a population of about 8 million it would be very unsafe. However, this is untrue. Despite having a population of more than 20 million people, NYC constantly ranks in the top ten safest large cities (more than 500,000 people) in the United States. New York City for a long time has been considered a particularly crimeridden and dangerous place, recent statistics, in fact, point to the contrary. This makes it one of the most visited places in the US. It has really cleaned up its act. The city’s crime rate has dramatically decreased over the last three decades. Due to the NYPD and the FBI and other officials that keep the streets safe, which is why the population is at a record high and growing, the life-expectancy has surged, and an all-time high of more than 50 million people visited the city during 2011. After 9/11, security was heightened throughout the city.

This made the city and most of the people in it feel as if they were safe. People who live in New York City love the feeling of the big city and they feel safe even with all the people around them.

Challenges NYC Faces

NYC: The Megacity Energy Gobbler

New York City is bound to have challenges with their population that exceeds 20 million people. One of these issues are shortages of houses resulting in homelessness. The vast majority of the homeless families simply can't afford current NYC rent. With only a limited amount of space, most people make rent very high. There are only so many square miles of land in the city, and especially in Manhattan, where most people want to be. When lots of people want to live in a limited space, this results in the higher rent. Another challenge NYC faces is the way that the school system is handled. The school systems also face lots of problems due to the massive amount of people that live there. Also due to the lack of space in the city, it is a scarce resource in a place like New York City, but it’s getting especially cramped for a growing number of students. New charter schools are clamoring for space in the unused buildings while at the same time the city is struggling to find enough space in parts of the city that young families are moving to. The overcrowding increase is still happening despite a three-year school construction boom in which the city opened more than 70 new school buildings, which helped but did not completely fix the problem.

Due to the mass migration to urban areas in recent years, there has been a corresponding boom in the number of megacities. In 1970, there were eight megacities. As of 2010, there were 27 of them, and there are expected to be 37 by 2020. NYC uses more water, energy, and solid waste than any other mega city. NYC has about 12 million people less than Tokyo, New York City uses more energy than Tokyo. New York was the lead per-capita user of water, followed by Guangzhou, Shanghai, Los Angeles and Tokyo. As New York gets bigger, the amount of energy it uses grows more and more each year. What works for Tokyo is that it leaks only 3 percent of its water, when most large cities leak about 20 percent. However, NYC and Tokyo use roughly about the same amount of energy. What makes NYC different than Tokyo is the fuel and solid waste difference. Actually, NYC uses a lot more energy than any other city in the world. Actually, megacities (35 of them) together consume 9.3 percent of the world's electricity and produce 12.6 percent of the world's waste even though they contain only 6.7 percent of the world's population. NYC is the capital of these, however, due to the fact that their population towers over most cities in the world.

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