Can the Gigacities of Tomorrow Keep Human Connection Alive?

Yet this engineering marvel of managing tens of millions of people in a single metro area comes with a human cost that is only beginning to be understood. Albert Bakhtizin — director of the Central Institute of Economics and Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a member of the academy, and a professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University — argues in a July 2026 op-ed in the South China Morning Post that we are losing the ability to bring people together into families even as we pack them into ever-larger metropolises . His core concern is that the sheer scale of gigacities strains the social fabric: physical and psychological isolation can increase even as population density soars, because the infrastructure, commuting distances, and economic pressures of hyper-large cities erode the time and space needed for meaningful interpersonal relationships and family formation .

Megacity to Gigacity: What the UN Projections Show

The shift from megacity to what Bakhtizin calls "gigacity" — cities of 50 million or more — is being driven overwhelmingly by Asia and Africa. The UN report notes that over half of the current 33 megacities (19) are in Asia . Dhaka and Jakarta are the lead actors in this story, but they are not alone. Lagos, Nigeria, could potentially reach 88 million by 2100, crossing the gigacity threshold decisively .

Bakhtizin notes that the centre of future large-scale urbanization is shifting toward Africa and South Asia . This is consistent with broader UN data showing that the world's urban population is projected to increase by more than 1.7 billion people by 2050, reaching roughly 6.5 billion .

Projected Populations of the World's Largest Cities (2025 vs 2050)

By 2050, Dhaka is expected to maintain a slim lead of roughly 300,000 residents over Jakarta, with both cities projected to see decades of explosive growth — Dhaka's population has grown at more than seven times the rate of Tokyo's since 2000 . Tokyo, meanwhile, is expected to fall to seventh position by mid-century, overtaken by rapidly growing cities such as Shanghai and New Delhi .

The Social Challenge: Why Bigger Might Not Mean Better

Bakhtizin frames the rise of gigacities as both an engineering triumph and a social challenge — the technological capacity to build and manage ever-larger urban concentrations has outpaced our ability to preserve the human-scale connections that sustain families and communities . This is not just a theoretical concern. Research on Russian megacities has found that residents are "socially and spatially disconnected," living under double pressure from the permanently accelerated and transformed structural-functional organization of the city .

As urban agglomerations cross the 50-million mark, the question Bakhtizin poses becomes urgent: Can we design gigacities that do not just house people but also help them form families, maintain friendships, and build communities? The UN data gives us the scale of the challenge — but the answer to whether human connection can survive that scale is still being written. What is clear is that the next 25 years will test both our engineering and our social imagination.

This article relies primarily on data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs World Urbanization Prospects 2025 and analysis from Albert Bakhtizin published in the South China Morning Post. All population figures are sourced from the UN's harmonised methodology and may vary slightly from national census figures.