Future Ready

2On the Street

In the middle of the 1800s, Los Angeles (L.A.) was a small town of fewer than 8,000 residents situated near a meandering river that emptied into the Pacific Ocean. The area had been home to small communities of humans for millennia—the native Tongva and Chumash were followed by a Spanish colonial outpost that was passed on to Mexico after its independence—but it had always been sparsely populated. Then, in 1850, California became the 30th state of the United States, and L.A.’s population exploded in the space of a few generations. In 1890, L.A. first entered the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of 100 biggest cities, at number 57, with a little over 50,000 people. By 1920, 576,000 people lived there, making it the 10th biggest city in the country and the largest on the West Coast. Over the next 10 years, the population more than doubled to 1.2 million, and L.A. rose to number 5, just behind Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City.

While L.A.’s rapid population growth was singular in U.S. history, its trajectory has been followed by urban areas around the world over the past two centuries. In fact, the recent population boom of some cities completely outpaces that of L.A. One example is Shenzhen, which was a rice-growing village in southern China’s Pearl River Delta region until relatively recently. In 1980, Shenzhen was designated China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and began four decades of breakneck growth. Today, it is one of China’s wealthiest and ...