Big Cities over Time I by Abhi

This redacted, heavily cited, and contradictory passage describes which city, the fastest growing in the world from 2000 to 2010?

Click for additional information

The walls are still intact in this Biblical image of what city, placed by some scholars as the first settlement that could definitively be called largest in the world?

Click for additional information

After the decline of the Egyptian empire, several thousand years went by before a city on the African continent was again largest in the world. Which city claimed this spot around 1170? It shares its name with a clothing item once popular in another city, which has been largest in the world under two different names.

The most common definition of a megacity has it as any urban area containing over 10 million people--according to UN data from 2016 there are currently 46. After China and India, which country has the third most, with three?

Before he escaped to freedom, he was sent to work in Baltimore, the second largest in the United States at the time, where he fell in love with a free black woman and learned to read--before escaping to his freedom into the third largest in the United States, Philadelphia. Name this activist and author.

In the final year of the USSR's existence, its three largest cities were current or former Russian capitals: Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev. The fourth was which modern Central Asian capital?

Of the top ten cities in the U.S. by population, San Francisco was at one point the only one on the west coast for three decades before falling off the list. In what decade did Los Angeles finally get the coast back on the charts?

This redacted passage is from an upcoming book about American colonies. Which blacked out city is mentioned in the third paragraph (final black mark)? Under some definitions it is the largest in the world today. (edited at 7:14 pm, November 13, 2018 (EST))

Click for additional information

Montreal has declined in relative importance since its peak population in the 1970s, and fell from second largest Francophone city in the world after Paris, to fourth. But what city has kwassa kwassaed past them both to be the largest French-speaking city today?

The planned city of Chandigarh has shot up to 40th largest city in India, after only being founded in 1949. Name either the world-famous architect who designed the city plan and most of its administrative buildings, or the province whose capital city it became, after the old capital of Lahore fell on the Pakistani side of the partition line.

The most rapidly urbanizing countries (percentage of population living in urban areas) are developing ones, as they transition to service or industrial economies. But even the largest economies continue to urbanize, as service jobs keep locating to existing centers of capital. Of the few *De*urbanizing countries, the only common thread is a lack of immigration and a declining birth rate. Name any deurbanizing country.

Urbanization is also increasingly being driven by climate change, as grazing and arable lands shift. Which city is the only one with a chiefly nomadic suburban population?