Skyline per capita | Kian Kyars

March 28, 2026

I calculated the vertical metres of supertall architecture per resident for the world’s largest cities.

The metric

For each city i, H_i represents the tallest completed building tracked by the CTBUH Skyscraper Center. P_i represents the residential population from Wikidata property P1082 using the March 2026 snapshot. The ratio is R_i = H_i / P_i.

When the Skyscraper Center lacked a city page, I used the tallest figure from curated national Wikipedia tables (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan) or hand-checked municipal sources.

R_i produces tiny values. The tables below multiply the result by 10⁶ to report micrometres of pinnacle per resident (µm / person). Dubai allocates each inhabitant about 0.21 millimetres of the Burj Khalifa.

Criterion

I selected the hundred most populous distinct English labels among Wikidata entities typed exactly as Q515 (city). This captures Beijing but omits Shanghai, Delhi, and Guangzhou, which use more specific regional classifications.

Number Math Fun

City-states, affluent second cities, and petro-capitals dominate the upper percentiles. Ultra-dense South Asian and West African basins occupy the bottom.

Top 15

Rank	City	Tallest (m)	Pop (Wikidata)	µm / resident
1	Dubai	828	3,944,751	209.9
2	Taipei	508	2,442,991	207.9
3	Kuwait City	413	2,989,000	138.2
4	Kaohsiung	348	2,733,964	127.3
5	Busan	412	3,453,198	119.3
6	Perth	253	2,141,834	118.1
7	Algiers	264	2,364,230	111.7
8	Phnom Penh	228	2,129,371	107.1
9	Toronto	298	2,794,356	106.6
10	Caracas	225	2,245,744	100.2
11	Brisbane	270	2,706,966	99.7
12	Pyongyang	274	2,863,000	95.7
13	Tashkent	267	2,956,384	90.3
14	Xining	219	2,467,965	88.7
15	Los Angeles	335	3,898,747	85.9

Basement

Rank	City	Tallest (m)	Pop (Wikidata)	µm / resident
89	Bamako	80	4,227,569	18.9
90	Prayagraj	110	5,954,391	18.5
91	Yangon	122	6,874,000	17.7
92	Kumasi	65	3,903,480	16.7
93	Surat	93	5,935,000	15.6
94	São Paulo	172	11,451,999	15.0
95	Kano	62	4,348,000	14.3
96	Lima	140	9,943,800	14.1
97	Chengdu	284	20,937,757	13.6
98	Lahore	150	11,126,285	13.5
99	Lagos	160	15,070,000	10.6
100	Dhaka	171	16,800,000	10.2

Full machine-readable rankings (all 100 rows) live alongside the Jekyll tree in misc/skyline_per_capita_ranked.json. The reproducible merge logic is misc/build_skyline_rankings.py, with raw Skyscraper Center passes cached by misc/skyline_per_capita_data.py.