But the UK capital does not even appear on the list of the 10 largest cities on earth in the year 2000. Two cities are on both lists. One of them is New York, whose population will have grown in a century from 4.2 million to 16.6 million. The other is Tokyo, up from 1.5 million people in 1900 to 28 million by next year. Tokyo sits on a fault line, and is overdue for a major earthquake.
Japanese memories are painfully fresh on the subject of earthquakes.
Underdevelopment The advice to Japanese families is to prepare a survival kit, a fireproof bag containing supplies for three days, torches, radios and first aid kits. Most of the world's biggest cities are in countries far poorer than Japan - places like Bombay, Sao Paulo and Lagos. A recent report from the Worldwatch Institute, Reinventing Cities for People and Planet, gave an outline. At least 220 million people in cities of the developing world lack clean drinking water, and 420 million do not have access to the simplest latrines. Six hundred million do not have adequate shelter, and 1.1 billion choke on unhealthy air.