Which cities anywhere in the world are growing both in population and urban structure at a high rate?

In my neck of the woods, Charlotte and Raleigh North Carolina. I think they are the fastest growing in the USA.

My nephews moved to Dubai. It just keeps on growing.
As long a right wing extreemists continue to have so much control in the US we won’t be investing in infrastructure necessary for new big cities.

You should go to China, they are building million resident cities across the country. There are new skyscrapers every time I go there although Beijing doesn’t seem to have changed, much.

Austin Texas
Raleigh North Carolina
Greater Phoenix Arizona
Dallas-Ft Worth Texas
Houston Texas

source

Is America still growing cities – absolutely – see any on this list, plus the next top 5 on the list.

Here are projected growth rates for the 100 fastest growing cities in the world. Las Vegas comes in at number 30, Austin at 76 and Atlanta 78.

San Francisco is not exactly that big. New York is probably the prototypical “super-city,” but it at Tokyo has largely exceeded it in that combination of scale/density some time ago. Nowadays massive growth in developing countries has probably created dozens of approximations of that kind of size and density. At least two Chinese cities are expected to, if they haven’t already, dethrone New York’s status as the most extensive rapid transit (“subway”) system.

Your question is a bit vague though. Growing fast is easy when you’re small. NYC has a million people and very fixed borders. Throwing another 75,000 people in NYC is probably fairly trivial. Other cities around the USA are geographically much larger, but have much smaller populations.

As for creating new ones, big cities require land use rules that don’t fit the USA car culture very well. Even New York largely stopped growing – in fact, spent decades shrinking – when it was remolded for auto-centric use. Perhaps the demographic limits of USA car culture have largely been reached, outside of Texas anyway, and younger people are being drawn to large cities. However, that trend is too young to say where it’s finally going to go. And baby boomers are probably too rigid to let land use policy change much while their icy grip is still on the electoral system.

(How many times have Obama or Schitt Romney mentioned cities in this election cycle?)

@bolwerk Name the major cities in the U.S.A. if San Francisco doesn’t exist in your book as a real city I don’t know what does.

@_Whitetigress: I don’t know what you mean by “real city,” but I wouldn’t describe San Francisco as what is known as a “world city” – the kind of that is a heavyweight on the world stage culturally/economically/financially/intellectually. Maybe some people would, but even then it’s kind of hard to put it in the same league as LA, Toronto, or Chicago, much less New York, London, or Tokyo.

I don’t count see Los Angeles as the kind of city I’m talking about. I guess I should have been more clear in the description. I’m referring to cities in which most of it’s citizens live in high rise buildings vs places like Los Angeles where most of it’s citizens live in suburban areas.

@_Whitetigress: Well, I doubt there is any city where most live in highrises. Even NYC is largely low-to-medium rise.

But I see your point. However, cities that developed highrise-centric downtowns usually did so in the prewar era and usually as a result of geographic or transportation constraints. The biggest obstacle to it now is probably politics.

@bolwerk AH!

“prewar era and usually as a result of geographic or transportation constraints”

I never thought about the transportation constraint ,thanks for bringing that to my attention :D

Dubai seems to be the city in the news these days. With all the unique structures an the extreme height. Including the Tallest city block in the world (City Block with nothing but record breaking skyscrapers with incredibly unique designs). So I’d have to say as far as I’m aware of that is one of the few city’s in the world that is growing at a notable rate.