Bangladesh's capital Dhaka has been given the number one spot in the list of the most densely populated cities in the world with 44,500 people living per sq km, according to the UN’s Habitat data collected from national census offices.
Mumbai has the second highest population density, followed by South America's Medellin and Manila in the Philippines, the Guardian reports.
Dhaka's position in the list gave little cause for surprise, given that Bangladesh is already one of the most populous countries in the world.
The measurement of density has been calculated for the administrative city area of Dhaka, including adjacent suburbs.
While the simplest definition of density is the amount of people divided by the land they occupy, the roots of dense urban growth for Dhaka are quite complex, which, when looked at through a socio-economic perspective, interlinks highly centralised infrastructural development coupled with a mushrooming of poor settlements and unplanned urbanisation.
However, people must find their livelihoods and places to live, and when there is a strong economic force drawing people with few resources into a city with limited regulation, unplanned housing and slums grow.
This creates closely packed neighbourhoods, which often have no political recognition and thus no recourse for basic human rights violations or protection from crime, drugs, disease or natural disasters.
But is density just about physical restrictions and is it all that terrible? Or is there more to it? Can the city's high population density be a potential climate response still untapped?
Although highly densely places have often been closely associated with moral decay, a group of modernist architecture and urbanism says that higher density city environments can also be made efficient with well-integrated sewage and water systems, greater public transport use and shorter time spent on commuting within the city.
Also, closely clustered dwellings such as those in Dhaka means that energy load is shared, and so, the city's density can have a positive effect on reducing carbon emissions and thus aid in climate change mitigation.