Boston was ranked 6th, but has fallen to 10th. Philadelphia, which was ranked 4th in 1950 is now fifth. There has been little stability in the rankings of the rest of the top 10, with only two 1950s entries remaining.

Like Chicago and Los Angeles, despite the clear improvement in many areas, population growth was small in the last decade, at 550,000. After that, however, the population began declining and did not recover until the 1990s. Los Angeles continued to add more than one million residents per decade through 2000, but has since fallen into the sluggish growth pattern more identified with the Northeast and Midwest, adding less than 400,000 residents between 20.įrom today's perspective, it may be surprising that New York grew strongly after 1950, adding 1.8 million residents in the 1950s and 2.0 million in the 1960s. Los Angeles passed Chicago by adding 2.5 million residents, the largest 10 year increase of any city since 1950. This is approximately four times the 300,000 added in between 20. This was a stunning achievement, because during the 1950s, Chicago also was experiencing strong growth, adding approximately 1.2 million residents. The top three cities remain the same, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago Los Angeles overtook Chicago between 19. Not unexpectedly, this new urban landscape has produced substantial shifts in the rankings of urban areas. The UN expects this trend to continue, projecting only 40 percent of the urbanized population to be in the Northeast and the Midwest by 2030 (Figure 1). By 1990, the share had dropped to one half. In 1950, two-thirds of the population of the urban areas in the UN list was located in the urban areas of the Northeast and the Midwest (including Washington & Baltimore). The United States has undergone an urban population revolution since 1950, the first year that urban areas were designated by the US Census Bureau. Urban areas are the city in its physical form – the built up area (as opposed to cities in their functional or economic form, the metropolitan area, which includes economically connected territory outside the built up area, from the urban core to the suburbs to the periphery bordering farms and other rural land). The UN provides data for the 135 urban areas with an estimated population of at least 300,000 residents in 2014. The publication provides perhaps the best summary of US urban area population trends since 1950 and also projects their population through 2030. One of the highlights is both historic and projected detailed population information for individual cities around the world.

The United Nations periodically publishes World Urbanization Prospects.

Most populous metro areas in us