Australia has picked up a dubious new international distinction: our big capital cities lead the world for their sparse population densities and urban sprawl.

A new study by the United Nations Population Division has ranked all the world’s cities with more than 1 million people according to population density.

Illustration by Simon Letch

Our very own Perth took the crown for the lowest urban population density – it ranked 510th out of the 510 cities on the list with fewer than 2000 people per square kilometre.

Not far behind was Brisbane, with the seventh-lowest population density. (Adelaide would have given Perth a run for its money but the South Australian capital didn’t make the list of cities with over 1 million people, according to the UN’s definition – although it is credited with a population of 1.47 million people by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.)

Even Australia’s urban giants, Melbourne and Sydney, were among the 40 lowest-density cities in the world – they rated alongside Las Vegas and were even less crowded than Los Angeles, a city synonymous with urban sprawl.

At the other end of the table, India’s “maximum city” – Mumbai – was ranked the world’s most densely populated city, with 27,000 people per square kilometre. That’s 14 times the density in Perth.

London came in at 297th for population density (with 6328 people per square kilometre) while New York City was 378th (5173 per square kilometre). Australia’s densest city, Sydney, was way behind in 475th place (3152 per square kilometre).

Cultural factors help explain why Australian cities are so sparsely populated compared with their global peers.

Thirty of the 50........

© The Sydney Morning Herald