The United Nations Population Fund has released their State of the World Population 2007 report online. They highlight that 2008 will be the year in which, for the first time in history, more than half (about 3.3 billion people) of the world's population will be living in urban areas. Caitlin at Geo Lounge has a nice summary.
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Keeping my comment brief, your data on population and cities is valuable as always. I drafted a scientific law thirty years ago which said, “In a pre-technological setting, for every individual who inhabits a city, you need about 9 others in a rural setting to sustain him”. (The same figures were cited for China and many other pre-industrial cultures in the 1990s.
A second Law argued, as a consequence, that whenever any city in the ancient world was inhabited by more than a pivotal number of persons–its government could no longer guarantee support for its populace without resorting to expansion, theft, piracy, wars, favored trade exactions, protection rackets, colonizations or other extra-legal “collectivistic means” I placed that figure as “the tipping point toward totalitarianism” at the figure of
60,000 plus for smaller cities (pressures beginning at 31,000) and 600,000 for mega-cities, pressure beginning at 310.000.
Some of the pressures we see in modern life–under failing constitutional governments–I claim come from the fact that once one exceeds a metropolitan size of 6 million (pressure beginning at 3.1 million), the same action results as in the smaller cases; but that by trying to swell cities to a 31–60 million person size, we are vastly exceeding our technological abilities to support the resulting monstrosity–by making de facto nations out of New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and tying the populace of vast regions to supplying their needs inadequately at great hardship.