# Jakarta overtakes Tokyo in new UN population rankings
Jakarta has overtaken Tokyo as the world’s most populous city, according to a new United Nations assessment that changed the rankings by using updated criteria for counting urban populations. The shift illustrates how much the definition of a city matters when comparing megacities, and it shows that population totals can look very different once the same statistical lens is applied across countries.
The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs estimates Jakarta’s population at 42 million people. Dhaka follows with 37 million, while Tokyo falls to third place with 33 million under the new method. That is a striking reversal from the UN’s previous 2018 report, which had placed Tokyo first with a population of 37 million.
The methodological change is central to the story. Patrick Gerland, who heads the population estimates and projection section at the UN department, said the new assessment provides a more internationally comparable delimitation of urban extent using similar population and geospatial criteria. In plain terms, the UN is trying to count cities in a way that is consistent across countries rather than relying on local definitions that can vary widely.
That matters because urban rankings are often used as shorthand for economic power, migration pressure, and infrastructure strain. If the definition shifts, the ranking shifts with it. The UN’s revised approach is meant to capture rapid urbanization more accurately, especially in places where the city proper, surrounding suburbs, and wider metropolitan zones do not fit neatly into older administrative boundaries.
The report also places the ranking change in a wider historical context. The number of people living in cities has more than doubled since 1950, when urban dwellers made up about 20% of the world’s 2.5 billion people. Today, nearly half of the world’s 8.2 billion people live in cities. By 2050, the UN projects that two-thirds of global population growth will occur in urban areas.
Jakarta’s rise to the top of the ranking reflects those pressures. The Indonesian capital has long been associated with congestion, development sprawl, and the challenge of managing growth across a large urban area. The new UN numbers do not remove those problems; they simply make them more visible in comparative form. For Dhaka and Tokyo as well, the ranking is less a trophy than a statistical illustration of how city regions have expanded and merged into vast urban systems.
Tokyo’s fall to third does not mean the city has shrunk in any ordinary sense. It means the new methodology places the city into a more standardized framework and compares it with Jakarta and Dhaka on the same basis. That is why the change is important: it is not just a reshuffle at the top, but a sign that old assumptions about the size of the world’s great cities are being revised.
For policymakers, planners, and researchers, the shift offers a cleaner global comparison, but it also raises a familiar warning. Urban populations are dynamic, and the numbers depend on what counts as urban in the first place. In that sense, Jakarta’s new position says as much about measurement as it does about demographic change.
