During the 1960s, the population of American metropolitan areas increased by nearly 17 percent, Edward Banfield notes — in The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974) — but this should not be cause for alarm:
American cities have frequently grown at fantastic rates (consider the growth of Chicago from a prairie village of 4,470 in 1840 to a metropolis of more than a million in fifty years).
Wow.
Wasn’t Chicago the biggest city in the world in 1900 that hadn’t existed in 1800? Tel Aviv was the biggest city in the world in 2000 that hadn’t existed in 1900.