Earth would make an important contribution to scientific progress (Tollefson 2012).
The picture shows a sharp contrast between the dark African continent and bright
western Europe and central India. It indicates a socioeconomic divide on a global
scale, which is typically referred to as the North/South divide or North-South
problems (Todaro and Smith 2015). The illuminated areas are like creeping and
growing slime fungi. They are cities, and large shining areas are the megacities on
which we are focusing on in this book. Some researchers positively consider cities a
symbol of civilization. Cities are engines of economic growth with their creativity
(Florida et al. 2008; Florida 2009). On the other hand, they may be considered bad
microbes, invading and eating away at the beautiful Earth. The controversy over the
views on cities has been a problem for a long time: Are cities a symbol of civilization
or a burden on the global environment?
Patterns of concentrations of population, power, capital, and goods vary in terms
of the scale of cities. Megacities, defined here as cities with more than ten million
Fig. 1.1 Blue Marble taken by Apollo 17 (Source: Image courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center.
https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id¼55418. Accessed on 25 June 2019)
2
S. Muramatsu and K. Mori
The picture shows a sharp contrast between the dark African continent and bright
western Europe and central India. It indicates a socioeconomic divide on a global
scale, which is typically referred to as the North/South divide or North-South
problems (Todaro and Smith 2015). The illuminated areas are like creeping and
growing slime fungi. They are cities, and large shining areas are the megacities on
which we are focusing on in this book. Some researchers positively consider cities a
symbol of civilization. Cities are engines of economic growth with their creativity
(Florida et al. 2008; Florida 2009). On the other hand, they may be considered bad
microbes, invading and eating away at the beautiful Earth. The controversy over the
views on cities has been a problem for a long time: Are cities a symbol of civilization
or a burden on the global environment?
Patterns of concentrations of population, power, capital, and goods vary in terms
of the scale of cities. Megacities, defined here as cities with more than ten million
Fig. 1.1 Blue Marble taken by Apollo 17 (Source: Image courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center.
https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id¼55418. Accessed on 25 June 2019)
2
S. Muramatsu and K. Mori