June 17, 2022
The population of the city of Tehran has now passed 9 million, ranking it as the 39th largest city in the world.
The population figure was part of a new report from the Statistical Center of Iran.
One of the most interesting of the figures released showed that of the 2.9 million households in the capital, 84 percent had male breadwinners while 16 percent were headed by women. The fact that one of every six families in the capital is headed by a woman is not a number the Islamic Republic will be proud of.
The numbers are for the city of Tehran. The province of Tehran has a population of 16.6 million and accounts for 20 percent of the country’s population.
The country is now 75 percent urban, a huge shift from a half century ago when it was only 30 percent urban. The revolution condemned the Shah for doing so little for rural communities that rural folk were flocking to the city. The revolution pledged to change that. It didn’t, and the shift to cities actually accelerated.
Iran’s second largest city is Mashhad with 3.6 million people. That ranks it the 141st largest city globally.
The world’s largest city by far is Tokyo with 37 million people, followed by Delhi with 32 million and Shanghai with 28 million. No other city even reaches 23 million.
New York City, the largest city in the US, only ranks 45th in the world with 8.2 million. In 1950, it ranked Number One in population globally.