Tuesday, March 25, 2008

List #25: World's Biggest Cities

Map of the 20 largest metropolitan areas, from Wikipedia


I did the important rivers of Asia a few posts ago. Today, I got into a discussion about the population of various cities around the world - and guess what? An idea for a list.

However, it's not an easy answer to the question of what are the ten largest cities in the world. One answer could be to define it as the population of the metropolitan area, which includes people relying on the city for resources and employment and the number of people who can commute into the city. And in these days of urban sprawl, where the areas between smaller cities are filled up... with more cities till it forms a big city, metropolitan areas can be very big.

Ten largest metropolitan areas. It's amazing that there is only one city from a developed country on this list, and that India has two cities on the list.
1 Tokyo 32,450,000 people
2 Seoul 20,550,000
3 Mexico City 20,450,000
4 New York City 19,750,000
5 Mumbai 19,200,000
6 Jakarta 18,900,000
7 Sao Paulo 18,850,000
8 Delhi 18,600,000
9 Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto 17,375,000
10 Shanghai 16,650,000

This is the list of biggest cities, if you think about city proper
1 Mumbai 13,073,926
2 Karachi 11,608,000
3 Delhi 11,505,196
4 Istanbul 11,174,257
5 São Paulo 11,016,703
6 Moscow 10,654,000
7 Seoul 10,421,000
8 Shanghai 9,838,400
9 Lagos 9,229,944
10 Mexico City 8,658,576
22 Bangkok 6,593,000

I'm really surprised that Bangkok - which seems so gigantic to me - is not on any of the top ten lists. It has a feeling of being much larger than NYC - but that could be because of it's so unorganized! It's not even on the list of 20 biggest metropolitan areas - but I guess that makes sense because there are very rural areas just outside Bangkok, where there are rice, vegetable and fruit farms.

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