A quiet revolution has just taken place in the way the world understands cities. The UN’s World Urbanization Prospects 2025 (WUP 2025) has redrawn the global urban map, revealing that Jakarta— not Tokyo— is now the world’s largest urban agglomeration. But the headline is not the story. What truly matters is the method behind it. For the first time, the report measures cities through a unified global lens— satellite-mapped built-up land, population density, continuous settlement patterns— instead of outdated and inconsistent national definitions that long distorted comparisons.
WUP 2025 makes this clear when it notes that “cities are now home to 45 per cent of the global population of 8.2 billion,” up from just 20 per cent in 1950. This standardised measure— the “Degree of Urbanization”— strips away administrative illusions and forces countries to confront reality as it actually exists on the ground. Whether it is Tokyo, Lagos, Jakarta, São Paulo, or Karachi, everyone is now measured by the same yardstick. That alone is a breakthrough in global urban transparency.
For Karachi, the implications are profound. Under older, locally crafted metrics, the city’s actual spread and density were chronically underestimated. WUP 2025 ends that ambiguity. The city’s unbroken sprawl, its vast informal settlements, its unstoppable migration flows, and its continuous built environment can no longer be hidden behind municipal boundaries that were obsolete decades ago. Karachi will almost certainly rank among the world’s largest megacities by mid-century— and the report compels us to acknowledge this, whether we are prepared or not.
But global recognition comes with global responsibility. Karachi continues to be managed as though it were a medium-sized town, even though it functions as a massive, hyper-dense economic engine. Fragmented governance, weak municipal finances, overlapping authorities, unplanned expansion, and a failing urban services ecosystem have created a megacity that operates on borrowed time. This is the crisis the UN’s ranking exposes: global-scale population, local-scale management.
The UN has changed the way the world sees cities. It is time Pakistan changes the way it sees Karachi. Data is no longer a matter of interpretation; the evidence is overwhelming. Karachi is too large to be ignored, too critical to be mismanaged, and too vulnerable to survive without a coherent metropolitan vision. The UN has done its part by holding up a global mirror. The question now is whether we are willing to look into that mirror — and finally act.
And the world is watching. As the report reminds, “two-thirds of global population growth by 2050 will occur in cities”— meaning more demand for water, housing, jobs, infrastructure, and mobility. Karachi is already buckling under these pressures. Chronic water scarcity, collapsing public transport, unchecked informal housing, rising environmental hazards, and the absence of integrated planning are no longer local inconveniences; they are structural threats to the city’s survival.
Yet population is not the enemy. Poor governance is. WUP 2025 itself emphasises that urbanization, “if guided inclusively, can unlock transformative pathways for climate action, economic growth and social equity.” Karachi’s demographic momentum can be an opportunity— but only if matched by planning, investment, and institutional reform. A city of this scale cannot function through improvised arrangements, politicised land battles, and fragmented authorities pulling in opposite directions.
What Karachi needs is clear: metropolitan-wide planning, transparent land governance, climate-resilient infrastructure, empowered local institutions, affordable housing frameworks, modern transit systems, and a social protection network that recognises the vulnerabilities created by rapid urban migration. Without this, WUP 2025 will not be a point of pride— it will be a marker of the moment the crisis became undeniable.
The UN has changed the way the world sees cities. It is time Pakistan changes the way it sees Karachi. Data is no longer a matter of interpretation; the evidence is overwhelming. Karachi is too large to be ignored, too critical to be mismanaged, and too vulnerable to survive without a coherent metropolitan vision.
The UN has done its part by holding up a global mirror. The question now is whether we are willing to look into that mirror — and finally act.
