A huge shift in global demographics now sees a world in rural decline, the global landscape today punctuated by city after city and the rise of the megalopolis. With 1.5 billion people (22% of the world’s population) living in over 600 cities, compared with only 3% of the population in 1800, and with these cities generating around 60% of global GDP, the shift represents not only vast economic and social changes across the world, but poses challenging questions to us about the nature of collective living and cultural identity today.

Every city has its own voice. We have ideas and assumptions about places which we have never even visited. And as a traveller or tourist, one wholly expects upon arrival in a different city to hear this strange new voice resonating in synchrony from its populace. We pitch up, guide books in hand, on the prowl for the distinctive sounds and stories of a new, untrodden land.

Whether we seek the dulcet tones of a welcoming Dubliner, armed with charm and a pint of the black stuff, the elegantly restrained riposte of a haughty, cigarette-waving Parisian or the laid-back chat of a beach-bound San Diego “dude”, we are demonstrating an awareness of this process of definition-by-dwelling, ascribing certain characteristics to people based on the place where they live.

In today’s world, the rise of the megacity is indeed rapidly altering the global demographic. Around one in twenty-five people live in what is classed as a megacity. There are currently 23 megacities with populations over 10 million, including Mexico City, Tokyo, Dehli, London and Paris, and this number is set to rise to 36 by the year 2025.

In such a colossal urban environment, is it still possible to identify a quirk, an eccentricity which makes that place particular or individual and characterises its citizens? Something which unites its inhabitants, who, mostly migrants, have their origins and histories in other places? Or is each inhabitant in a city of millions rendered faceless and unidentifiable? Perhaps Rousseau was right: “Cities are the abyss of the human species”.

The sheer size of a megacity does undeniably make the task of ascribing an identity challenging, yet I contest that every city irrefutably has its own voice, its own idiosyncrasies and its own “feel”. This could be said to arise from two main features: firstly, the architectural landscape and infrastructure, and secondly, the architecture of the language of that place.

According to Steven Fry’s recent episode of ‘Fry’s Planet Word’, each language that we come into contact with is a symbol of a shared cultural identity. More than 6000 languages pervade our planet, each an encapsulation and an emblem of a people’s history, and perhaps more importantly, of an identity, a personality; they provide as much a form of expression as a form of cultural impression.

Fry even traces senses of humour back through old languages such as Yiddish, and demonstrates that words, language, dialects and accents shape us, and consequentially our municipalities as much as the buildings which surround us. In short, we inhabit a language as truthfully as we inhabit our city dwellings.  However, thanks to globalisation, the international megacity and the prevalence of Globish (global English), perhaps in some respects we have regressed from the days of Babel, the scattering of languages and the creation of diversity in the human race to a shrunken world in a state of global, soulless unity.

Fortunately, this is only half the story, as we need only look beyond the commercial, business world of megalopolitics for reassurance that these idiosyncrasies are still prevalent. Specificities in urban language, accent and lexicon and their portrayal in the world of art and culture allow a city’s personality to thrive despite the pressures of conforming to the global mould.

Unfortunately, the megacity does not, however, come without its drawbacks; not every defining characteristic is a good one. What we are often confronted with in the megacity is a fractured, fragmented populus, shaped as much by difference and disparity as by their shared urban identity. A megalopolis such as Mexico City epitomises these issues, and through films such as surrealist Buñuel’s ‘Los Olvidados’, artistic depictions of violence, mobocracy and marginalisation  serve to demonstrate the reality of life on the urban peripheries of the modern city. In a rather negative sense, then, we can see that the city and its citizens are also defined by the physical urban landscape which they inhabit.

Take another much more trivial example – the apparently ominous infrastructure of London’s public transport. It practically conditions any outsider into a state of tense, mute silence as they emulate the averted gazes of the city’s hardwired commuters. A Londoner wouldn’t bat an eyelid (literally, wouldn’t bat an eyelid), yet in the eyes of a tourist or a visitor, an apparent austerity seems pervasive and infectious. However, urban conditioning is not always perceived as a negative thing. Far from it.

On a much greater scale, the urban landscape and its redevelopment has had the power to alter and transform entire cultures. The complete redesign of Paris, for instance, under Louis-Napoleon both created and facilitated the boulevard-based culture of the ‘flâneur’ which is an iconic association with the French capital today. Thus, it is definitely possible to characterise the megacity. Its citizens are more than just a cog in the merciless mechanism of the ‘concrete jungle’. But this characterisation encompasses the city’s conflicting identities and developments as much as any sense of overall cohesion. As a result, this multifarious question of identity exposes the truth behind the mask of touristic expectations of a stereotypical, straight-forward city identity.

Even megacities, it would seem, have their own individual architecture; the worlds of each inhabitant are present both in a skyline of fears, anticipations, aspirations and expectations, and in the verbal and artistic culture that permeates the city’s streets.