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Seoul: the Sneaky Big City
Recently I have come to think of Seoul, South Korea, as the ‘world’s sneaky big city’. That idea was spawned when I read a piece on the world’s most populace cities and those likely to enter the club going forward.
It included most of the usual current suspects Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, New York, kind of hanging on, India with four coming candidates, the odd one from Southeast Asia, most prominently Jakarta and then the up and comers from Africa, led by Lagos, Nigeria. There was note of Mexico and maybe a couple of South American candidates. This projection did not consider effects of climate change to growth in the coming decades.
I was surprised, even horrified, that Seoul, the second largest contiguous metropolis in the world at nearly 30 million, behind only Tokyo and ahead of Shanghai, was omitted.
In 1970, for a week, I first visited Seoul. From September 1972 until March 1974, I lived there and even then it was listed among the top half dozen big cities in the world.
Again, I lived in Seoul from March 1978 until September of the same year. My last visit was for three days in 2015.
Now Seoul is listed as the fourth largest metropolitan economy in the world behind Tokyo, New York and Los Angeles. Several Chinese cities are on the verge of elbowing themselves into this pack.
