Episode – 2112 : The World’s Worst Located Cities

Episode – 2112 : The World’s Worst Located Cities

Podcast Transcript
All over the world, there are cities and towns. Some of those have become major urban areas that are culturally and economically important to their regions, countries, or even the world.
Most of those cities were selected because they offered some geographical advantage.
However, unbeknownst to the founders of those cities, they overlooked something that has made the location a liability rather than an asset.
Learn more about the world’s worst located cities and what makes them so bad on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
I’ve been thinking about doing an episode on this subject for a while, because I find it really interesting.None of the cities I’ll be covering knew about the problems they would face when they were founded. In fact, the selection of these cities’ locations was, in most cases, downright reasonable at first.
However, over time, and especially as the cities grew, problems began to arise. In several cases, the problems have become quite serious and required substantial investment to rectify.
What I’m not going to be covering in this episode are cities that are subject to natural disasters. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis cannot be controlled, and they usually affect entire regions rather than specific cities.
Every city in Florida is in danger of getting hit by a hurricane, and every city in Japan could be flattened by an earthquake.
By the end of the episode, you’ll see that all the cities I cover all share one thing in common.
So, with that, let’s start with our first city, located in a horrible place, and that would be one many of you are probably thinking of: New Orleans.
At first glance, New Orleans appears to be in a great location. Many cities are located at strategic points on major rivers. Placing a city near the mouth of the Mississippi River seems like a great idea.
New Orleans was an important asset for both the French and Spanish, and it was the crown jewel of the Louisiana Purchase. It was targeted in both the War of 1812 and the American Civil War because of its strategic value.The problem isn’t with a city on the Mississippi River; the problem is with the specific location that was chosen for New Orleans.
New Orleans has one of the worst urban geographies in the world because the city is trying to occupy land that naturally wants to be wet, flood regularly, and slowly disappear.
Much of New Orleans was built on soft delta soils created by the Mississippi River. These sediments are young, loose, water-rich, and naturally compact over time. When heavy buildings, roads, and infrastructure are placed on them, the ground compresses.
Large areas of New Orleans were historically swamps or marshes. Once engineers drained these wetlands to develop neighborhoods, the organic soils were exposed to air, dried out, decomposed, and shrank. Land that was once a spongy wetland literally lowered in elevation after being drained.
Groundwater movement and regional subsidence add to the problem. As a result, some neighborhoods have sunk significantly over the last century, leaving portions of the city below sea level.
To make matters worse, New Orleans sits between several major water bodies: the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, surrounding wetlands, canals, and the Atlantic Ocean. Water can threaten the city from multiple directions at once.
Because some neighborhoods are below sea level, rainfall cannot simply drain away by gravity. Instead, water is often mechanically pumped out through one of the world’s largest urban pumping systems. If pumps fail, lose power, or are overwhelmed by heavy rain, streets can flood quickly.
Levees and floodwalls are essential but imperfect. They must hold back river floods, storm surge, and lake water. This creates a constant engineering burden: walls, gates, pumps, and canals all need maintenance and upgrades.
The catastrophic example was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It was not simply rain that caused the disaster, but failures in levees and floodwalls combined with storm surge. Large parts of the city filled like a bowl.
New Orleans is only going to keep sinking into the future. On average, the city sinks about bout 5–6 millimeters per year but parts of the city is sinking at rates of 20-30 millimeters per year.
It is entirely possible that in the future, some neighborhoods will be abandoned simply because they will become too costly to protect.
The next poorly located city seems like the exact opposite of New Orleans, but it actually suffers from the same problem: Mexico City.
Mexico City was originally founded by the Aztecs as Tenochtitlan in 1325. It was located on an island in Lake Texcoco. The site was chosen for defensive advantages, access to lake resources, and because it matched a religious prophecy that marked the location as sacred.
Causeways, canals, and island farming, known as chinampa agriculture, made it one of the most impressive cities in the world before the Spanish arrived.
After the Spanish conquest, colonial authorities viewed the lakes as obstacles and threats. Flooding periodically affected the new colonial capital, so they began massive drainage projects to channel water out of the basin through tunnels, canals, and later modern drainage works. Over centuries, much of the lake system disappeared.
That decision created several long-term problems. First, most of the city was built on soft lakebed sediments. When those sediments were saturated with water, they were more stable.
As the lakes were drained and groundwater was later pumped heavily, the clay soils compressed and shrank. This is why much of Mexico City now sinks unevenly, damaging buildings, roads, pipes, and historic structures.Second, the city lost a natural water storage system. The lakes once absorbed rainfall and seasonal runoff. Without them, heavy rains cause flooding because water has fewer places to spread naturally, while in dry periods, the city faces shortages and must import water or pump from aquifers.
Third, draining the lakes disrupted the local ecology and climate. Wetlands vanished, dust increased, and natural groundwater recharge declined.
It is a similar problem to New Orleans, but with a totally different cause.
Mexico City is sinking at different rates across neighborhoods, so there is no single citywide number. Some areas are relatively stable, while others are among the world’s fastest-subsiding urban zones.
In many parts of the metropolitan area, subsidence is commonly measured at 5 to 20 centimeters per year (about 2 to 8 inches annually).
In the worst-hit zones built over the old lakebed, studies have recorded rates approaching 30 to 50 centimeters per year (roughly 1 to 1.5 feet annually) during certain periods.
Sinking is not the only problem. When seismic waves from distant earthquakes reach the valley, those soft water-rich sediments act like a bowl of gelatin, slowing the waves and greatly amplifying their motion.
The shaking can last longer and become far stronger than in nearby areas on firmer ground. That is why earthquakes centered far from the city, such as the 1985 quake, caused catastrophic damage in Mexico City despite the epicenter being hundreds of miles away.
The valley in which Mexico City sits also collects smog and pollution. On top of that, temperature inversions also make the problem worse. Cooler air can become trapped beneath a layer of warmer air, acting like a lid that traps pollutants close to the ground.
Because the city receives strong sunlight at high elevation, those trapped emissions can react chemically, forming ozone and photochemical smog.
The next poorly located city is Jakarta, which has similar problems.
Jakarta has one of the worst urban locations in the world because it combines low elevation, flooding rivers, coastal exposure, unstable ground, and extreme population pressure.
Jakarta sits on the northwest coast of Java on a flat delta plain where numerous rivers flow into the sea. Much of northern Jakarta is at or below sea level, so heavy rain, river flooding, and tidal flooding can all threaten the city simultaneously.
During monsoon season, intense rainfall upstream and inside the city can overwhelm drainage systems and inundate neighborhoods.
The ground beneath Jakarta is largely made of geologically recent river sediments, which are soft and prone to subsidence. For decades, many residents and businesses relied on groundwater wells because piped water service was inadequate.
Pumping water from these sediments caused parts of the city to sink dramatically. In some northern districts, the land dropped so much that the risk of flooding worsened year after year.
Its coastal location also exposes the city to sea-level rise and storm surges. Even modest sea-level increases become serious when the land itself is sinking.
The problems in Jakarta have become so severe that the Indonesian government has decided to move the nation’s capital to Nusantara on the island of Borneo.
Jakarta has grown organically over time, and it’s become a mess. While I like most of Indonesia, Jakarta is one of my least favorite cities. Nusantara offers Indonesia a fresh start in a better-suited spot that is also less prone to earthquakes and volcanoes.
The final city I want to discuss is in a very different location, but also has problems with water: Tehran.Tehran sits at the foot of the Alborz Mountains on a semi-arid plateau. Naturally, the city depended on seasonal snowmelt, mountain streams, springs, and underground aquifers.
Historically, Iran used qanats, gently sloping underground tunnels, to bring mountain groundwater into settlements.
That older system was overwhelmed by modern growth. Tehran grew into a metropolitan area of well over 10 million people, with far higher domestic, industrial, and landscaping water demand than the natural system could support.
The city now relies on dams, reservoirs, pipelines, and groundwater pumping. In recent drought years, Tehran’s major reservoirs have fallen sharply, and officials have warned of possible rationing and severe shortages.
One solution Tehran has used to address its water problem has been pumping groundwater from the aquifer beneath the city. Aquifers are not giant underground lakes; they are layers of sediment containing water in pores and spaces. If you remove water faster than rainfall and snowmelt recharge it, the sediment compacts.
As a result, Tehran is facing the same problem as every other city I’ve mentioned in this episode, but for different reasons: subsidence.
Tehran is sinking at an alarming rate. However, because Tehran faces a water shortage, it also faces a unique problem: sinkholes.
Tehran has experienced many enormous random sinkholes that have appeared out of nowhere, completely destroying buildings and streets.
As with Mexico City, Tehran is in an earthquake-prone region. If foundations, pipelines, metro tunnels, or buildings are already weakened by subsidence, even a moderate earthquake could cause much greater damage than normal.
Experts warn that land deformation can compromise roads, water lines, gas networks, and structures before any quake even occurs.
On top of that, Tehran is also just plain running out of water. In late 2025, officials warned Tehran’s reservoirs had fallen to critically low levels, with some neighborhoods already experiencing pressure cuts and outages.
The crisis is largely man-made. Decades of overbuilding dams, inefficient agriculture that consumes most of the country’s water, leaking infrastructure, subsidized water prices, and heavy groundwater pumping have drained aquifers faster than they can refill.
Iran has periodically discussed relocating its capital away from Tehran because of all its problems.
The leading concept has been to create a new administrative capital in the Makran region on Iran’s southern coast near the Gulf of Oman, potentially around Chabahar.
Supporters argue that a coastal capital could have better long-term access to water, more room to grow, and stronger trade connections via maritime shipping.
There are, of course, other cities that have poor locations. Las Vegas is a great example, which I covered in a previous episode. Deserts are bad places for cities.However, the four cities that I’ve covered in this episode are all slowly sinking away because the problem is literally the land beneath their feet.

This episode can be found at: https://everything-everywhere.com/the-worlds-worst-located-cities/