Sure, but that's also not comparable. Dubai's population was 20.000 (!) in 1950. 500k in 1990, 3+ million today. That's a ~150x growth over the lifetime of a si

Sure, but that's also not comparable. Dubai's population was 20.000 (!) in 1950. 500k in 1990, 3+ million today. That's a ~150x growth over the lifetime of a single person. London has grown by I think 20-ish percent over the last thirty years and was alreay affluent and large decades ago. Which is still pretty swift compared to Berlin or Paris. The kind of catch up growth where cities are built out of nothing an old city cannot compete with.