1. Cairo
2. Delhi
3. Kolkata
4. Chennai
5. Mumbai
6. Ahmedabad
7. Dhaka
8. Seoul
9. Guangzhou
10. Buenos Aires
11. Tokyo
12. Surat
13. Jakarta
14. Kanpur
15. New York City
16. Tehran
17. Wuhan
18. Moscow
19. Yokohama
20. Bangalore

Look at the article for methodology and further rankings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population

Some surprises for me. Why is Buenos Aires so densely populated? With so much land in the country how did it become more dense than Tokyo?

Notice that Pakistani cities are near the bottom of the long list. How is this possible?

The list you made does not in any way match the list in the link you posted, in fact, the list you posted has nothing to do with population density; it is regarding city proper populations.

..
I believe they were ranking this based on city government defined borders, which would logically be easier to count the population with instead of more fluid metro areas.

Therefore, Buenos Aires with a (land) area of 203 km2/78.5 sq mi is small compared to Tokyo Metropolis' area of 2,187.08 km2/844.4 sq mi: which includes what we normally think of as Tokyo, towns to its west, and outlying islands in the Pacific Ocean (Izu Islands has a larger area than Buenos Aires but with just under 25k people).

The list you made does not in any way match the list in the link you posted, in fact, the list you posted has nothing to do with population density; it is regarding city proper populations.

There is a population density column. Press the list in order button twice and the table will rearrange itself in the format I've given.

Different borders, different population-density-profiles.

A pretty useless comparison, being that "city propers" are never comparable. For example, you have cities like Paris where the municipality is only a small portion of the entire metro area, or then there are cases like Hong Kong where there is no distinction between municipality and metro, and most of the land area is comprised of forests, and so on and so forth.

Also, this list is missing so many cities - for example, Manila at 43,079 people/km2, Paris at 20,807/km2, Barcelona at 15,991/km2, etc.

Calling these lists "useless" is too strong, but they have some limits.

It's been suggested that the overall density of a large metro area is not very useful because there are often large variations within the area. People looking for density are probably more interested in the densities of the districts that constitute the 100k or 500k or 2M people living in the densest situations. This strikes me as the most interesting comparison in terms of whether there is a truly dense urban neighborhood or group of neighborhoods.

We dont have metro area,how do you count with that?

Maybe this Wikipedia list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density) is more accurate in regards to population density? Paris seems to be the most dense of the major Western city in the world.

The funny fact about buenos aires (metropolitan area) is that the 33% of the population of Argentina is in the city, the area is smaller, because the center of the city is just a few meters from the river plate (As big as a sea), but inside of the city limits de density is huge, the cities around, were nearly towns that grow realy big, because of the proximity of Buenos Aires, with the time and the railroads, the area became into a only one big city.
But the city of Buenos Aires has only 3 millon inhabitants, and is an autonomous district, the rest of metropolitean area, is part of the Buenos Aires province, but is a different district.

in this photo, in the upper right corner, is Montevideo, the Uruguay capital, and in the lower left corner is Buenos Aires metropolitan area...
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/2237/satelliteimagephotomont.jpg

Maybe this Wikipedia list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density) is more accurate in regards to population density? Paris seems to be the most dense of the major Western city in the world.

manhattan is denser, and it has comparable pop to paris. this is part of the reason city limits comparisons are so useless imo.

This is sort of my point: Manhattan, or even a subsection of it, is an adequately large area to determine if there is an area of density in NY. City limits are too arbitrary; entire metros are too large. Selecting the densest areas that aggregate to 500k or 1M (or larger for very large metros) gives the most interesting comparisons.

Of course, in NY and Paris none of this really matters because both are very urban and dense and determining "the densest" (while possibly entertaining) is just not very relevant to real urban issues.

Manila is the most densely populated city on earth.

Yonghe in Taiwan also has a population density of over 40,000/km².

This is sort of my point: Manhattan, or even a subsection of it, is an adequately large area to determine if there is an area of density in NY. City limits are too arbitrary; entire metros are too large. Selecting the densest areas that aggregate to 500k or 1M (or larger for very large metros) gives the most interesting comparisons.

Of course, in NY and Paris none of this really matters because both are very urban and dense and determining "the densest" (while possibly entertaining) is just not very relevant to real urban issues.

i liked the 1600km2 immediately around the city center comparison a board member came up with.

Calling these lists "useless" is too strong, but they have some limits.

It's been suggested that the overall density of a large metro area is not very useful because there are often large variations within the area. People looking for density are probably more interested in the densities of the districts that constitute the 100k or 500k or 2M people living in the densest situations. This strikes me as the most interesting comparison in terms of whether there is a truly dense urban neighborhood or group of neighborhoods.

OK, I'll do Barcelona and its suburb Hospitalet

Densest 100K area in Barcelona is made up of the neighbourhoods

Gracia Nova
Sagrada Familia
Camp de l'Arpa

126.856 inhabitants
2,44 square km (0,94 square mile)
51.990 people per square km (134.953 per sq mile)

Densest 100K area in Hospitalet is made up of the neighbourhoods

La Torrassa
La Florida
Collblanc
Pubilla Cases

112.173 inhabitants
1,95 square km (0,75 square mile)
57.524 people per square km (149.568 per sq mile)


Densest 500K area (city center)

499.427 inhabitants
12,42 square km
40.192 people per square km (104.098 per sq mile)

Second densest 500K area (Basically Hospitalet and south part of Barcelona)

502.649 inhabitants
13,49 square km
37.251 people per square km (96.505 per sq mile)

Hong Kong is probably the densest if you only count urban areas (not the hills), and only count the central parts of town. But there really is no parallel comparison.