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Program a map to display the frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse. the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . .

William Gibson, Neuromancer

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of cities on a vast scale, whether they’re dense agglomerations of people in arcologies or unimaginably vast sprawls of apartments and skyscrapers. The ultimate outcome of such a concept is typified by the concept of the ecumenopolis or “world city.” Various sizes of concentrations of people on a larger scale than currently exists are part of the study of Ekistics, the study of all kinds of human settlements and how they develop.

As the human population increases, barring the colonization of space or a great die-off that reduces the population of Earth, the growth of larger cities and the increased blurring of lines between urban areas seems inevitable. Already, parts of the planet have great areas of very dense population, as shown in this demographic information (PDF). The densities of the cities of India, particularly Mumbai and Kolkata are amazing, but we shouldn’t overlook places like Kinshasa which are large and extremely dense cities.