Urban Issues and ChallengesIntroduction

300,000 New Arrivals Every Year

Part of Urban Sustainability and MegacitiesGCSE Geography

This introduction covers 300,000 New Arrivals Every Year within Urban Sustainability and Megacities for GCSE Geography. Revise Urban Sustainability and Megacities in Urban Issues and Challenges for GCSE Geography with 15 exam-style questions and 20 flashcards. This is a high-frequency topic, so it is worth revising until the explanation feels precise and repeatable. It is section 1 of 14 in this topic. Use this introduction to connect the idea to the wider topic before moving on to questions and flashcards.

Topic position

Section 1 of 14

Practice

15 questions

Recall

20 flashcards

🏙️ 300,000 New Arrivals Every Year

It is 6am in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The city is already moving. Rickshaws weave between trucks. A garment worker catches the bus that will take her to one of the thousands of factories producing clothes for high-street brands across Europe and North America. She left her village three years ago — the floods had taken the harvest twice in a row, and her family needed a wage that farming could no longer provide.

She is one of approximately 300,000 people who move to Dhaka every single year. That is the equivalent of a city the size of Coventry arriving in Dhaka in twelve months. Add them year after year, decade after decade, and you have one of the most extraordinary human stories of our time: the rise of the megacity.

In 1950, there were just two cities on Earth with more than 10 million inhabitants — New York and Tokyo. By 2024 there were 37 of them, home to more than half a billion people. Almost all of that growth happened not in the wealthy countries of Europe and North America, but in the rapidly urbanising nations of Africa and Asia. Understanding why megacities grow, what problems they create, and how those problems can be managed is one of the central challenges of 21st-century geography — and one of the most reliably examined topics in your GCSE.

Keep building this topic

Read this section alongside the surrounding pages in Urban Sustainability and Megacities. That gives you the full topic sequence instead of a single isolated revision point.

Practice Questions for Urban Sustainability and Megacities

What is the minimum population required for a city to be classified as a megacity?

  • A. 1 million people
  • B. 5 million people
  • C. 10 million people
  • D. 20 million people
1 markfoundation

Describe two features of a sustainable city.

2 marksstandard

Quick Recall Flashcards

What does urban sustainability mean?
Improving city life without creating bigger future social, economic or environmental problems.
What three dimensions of sustainability should students remember?
Social, economic and environmental.

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