I threw this together this morning to further compare the urban area size of cities. There's been a lot of debate and a huge thread about it so I hope this helps to clear things up. Every image is at exactly the same scale, forgive me if I am a bit off with some of the boundaries.

They are all from Google maps. I may add more later if there are some requests.

It's 1.6MB, so give it a sec to load.

Cheers

P

http://spotyo.orcon.net.nz/city2.JPG

San francisco bay area is quite large, whats the population?Nice job though. Dhaka is so small!

Well done.:cheers:

Japanese and South American cities are HUGE! :omg:
nice to see Metro Manila there.:okay:

The 2006 US Census estimates put the "San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA CSA (Consolidated Statistical Area)" at 7,228,948. That's a fairly accurate estimate of the Bay Area's population.

Nice job there! American cities/metros are so huge!

Stockholm and Copenhagen cant be the same scale:S
Copenhagen looks 10 times bigger than sthlm is this picture.

IT IS more urban definatly, but i cant be that much bigger.

Stockholm and Copenhagen cant be the same scale:S
Copenhagen looks 10 times bigger than sthlm is this picture.

IT IS more urban definatly, but i cant be that much bigger.

Copenhagen looks bigger than Rome and Amsterdam, and Athens :lol:

The pic of Berlin seems wrong to me..it's almost as large as Paris but on this pic you can only see forests

but nevertheless good job :)

Stockholm and Copenhagen cant be the same scale:S
Copenhagen looks 10 times bigger than sthlm is this picture.

IT IS more urban definatly, but i cant be that much bigger.

No the Stockholm pic shows only part of Stockholm, maybe 1 400 000 out of 1 800 000 but the Copenhagen one shows the entire metropolitan area, in reality Stockholm is lager than Copenhagen cause of lower density.

About the Barcelona pic, it shows the metro area wich has some 5 million people
but the city itself has about 1.5 million and only encompass maybe 1/100th of that pic.

Nice job there! American cities/metros are so huge!

Attributed to poorly planned and car dominated low density.

Copenhagen looks bigger than Rome and Amsterdam, and Athens :lol:Copenhagen is very sprawly for a European city, with some 900.000 out of the 1.8mil living in houses or 2 story buildings, hence the large size and relatively low population..

Stockholm and Copenhagen cant be the same scale:S
Copenhagen looks 10 times bigger than sthlm is this picture.

IT IS more urban definatly, but i cant be that much bigger.

About the Stockholm vs Copenhagen issue, Stockholm metro is spread out on an area 3 times the size of Copenhagen metro and not nearly as dense as CPH

Copenhagen-Stockholm same scale...
http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/4614/cphvsskh2milesqz4.jpg

yah that matches my scales, I thought it was strange how big copenhagen looked as well, so i made sure to triple check the scales.

^Copenhagen is not as small as people like to think :)


Oh and very nice work btw - must have taken forever?

Judging from the satellite pics, the largest overbuilt area is Greater Tokyo. :eek: And, Nagoya looks bigger than Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto (Kansai Region)!!!

Surprisingly huge overbuilt expanses [in no, particular, order]:
1. Miami
2. San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area
3. Dallas-Fort Worth
4. "Chicagoland"
5. Seattle-Tacoma Area

But in reality, it goes like this: (Sorry, no figures.)
1. New York Tri-State Area
2. Greater Tokyo Area
3. Greater Los Angeles Area "Southland"
4. "Chicagoland"
5. Atlanta
...and so on...

couple of hours :~

Here's a couple of smaller ones, what else should I do?

New York/Tokyo
http://spotyo.orcon.net.nz/nytokyo.JPG

The big 4 of Europe
http://spotyo.orcon.net.nz/europebig4.JPG

Miami is LONG :D

should of just ran the picture from boston to d.c and just called it northeast "megapolis". that would of been long as hell lol

^^ If you'd do that the picture will be too huge. And, besides, if you do that you'll have to do the same for:

* Utsunomiya-Tokyo-Shizouka-Nagoya-Osaka-Fukuoka Megalopolis (Tokaido-Sanyo Rail Corridor)
* Sao Paulo-Rio de Janeiro Megalopolis
* San-San/So-Cal Megalopolis (San Francisco - Los Angeles-San Diego-
* Taipei-Kaouhsiung Megalopolis
* Pearl River Delta Megalopolis (Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Dongguan-Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai)
* Yangtze River Delta Megalopolis (Shanghai-Nanjing-Hangzhou-Ningbo-Wuxi-Suzhou)
* Mexico City and Environs
* The Blue Banana (Southern British Isle-Southern France-the Benelux-Northern Italy)
* European Sunbelt Cities (from Barcelona all-the-way to Naples)
* Greater Seoul (extending all-the-way to Busan and Daegu)
* Beijing-Tianjin Area
* Java Island Megalopolis (Jakarta-Surabaya-Yogyakarta)
* German Heartland Megalopolis
* Chi-Pitts Area/"Great Lakes" Megalopolis (Chicago-Milwaukee-Detroit-Indianapolis-Cleveland-Cincinnati-Columbus-Buffalo N.Y.-Pittsburgh-Hamilton-Mississuaga-Toronto)
* Houston-Dallas-Fort Worth Area
* Moscow and Environs
* Miami-Palm Beach Metroplex
* Chongqing-Chengdu Basin
* Northern South Asia (Dhaka all-the-way to New Delhi)

Good picture, My only recommendation would be to make some lines to divide it up, easier to see.

^Copenhagen is not as small as people like to think :)


I know Copenhagen is a big city, but I doubt its bigger then Rome, or Athens

^Population-vise ofcause not...

But it does spread out quite a bit, certainly more than people tend to think!

Luckily pictures doesn't lie :)

If I wasn't told that was Houston I wouldn't have believed it. Looks like a city of 70,000 instead of 2 million. Compare it to New Orleans.

Have I missed Vienna, or isnt it there?

Berlin must be wrong definitely...its much bigger than Munich but in the picture it looks much smaller

Tel Aviv (+map the google image is so bad)
http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/7715/telavivhn5.jpg

http://spotyo.orcon.net.nz/europebig4.JPG

Good picture, My only recommendation would be to make some lines to divide it up, easier to see.

ok, go on then.

I resized 'em exactly at the same scale (according the scale on the right of every pic)


London

http://i19.tinypic.com/4z2sbgo.jpg

Paris

http://i7.tinypic.com/4ti8m1g.jpg

Milan

http://i16.tinypic.com/61yfqe8.jpg

Madrid

http://i11.tinypic.com/6ceocb9.jpg

^^ Why do I get the feeling that Greater London is bigger area-wise compared to Metro Paris.

SEOUL is amazing, so small an area for 23 million people! I heard as country S. Korea is the densest place on the planet if you take account of inhabited land.

HK-Shenzhen too with 18 million.

Nice to see al those cities, and Amsterdam offcorse;

http://www.planet.nl/upload_mm/b/9/c/1974740866_1999998364_SatellietAmsterdam.jpg

Rotterdam;
http://kromjong.nl/images/rotterdam.jpg

beijing is so small, smaller than most main city in the world, seems only 1/20 of tokyo metro.

beijing urban eara: 735 square KM
shanghai urban eara:610 square KM
while Newyork urban eara: 32400 square KM
beijing is the largest city in china, but still so small.
chinese old leaders still try their best to control the scale of the city, "shanghai is too big! we have to control shanghai population! or shanghai will be a chaos" they know what? i really hate our goverment, those old men.

Beijing ain't that small actually. Beijing Municipaility extends for like 17,000++ square kilometers. Though, I concede that the urban area is quite small in today's standards. However, you should note that there's serious under-representation of most cities in that picture. And, besides...those satellite images are already out-of-date, especially for Chinese cities, given China's speed of development.

Come to think of how big Beijing or rather the "East China Region" is. Go check out Google Earth or Google Maps and try browsing, scanning, and dragging your mouse to Beijing's surroundings and you'll realize that there are dense farming communities extending as far as Guangdong Province and as far Northeast to Heilongjiang Province. Now, imagine how that area would look 20-30 years from now when China becomes a developed country. Imagine mega-suburbs with ultra-large expressways as well as dense high-rise clusters dotted with trainstations. I'm hidging on the "big" possibility whereby these dense mesh of farming communities/villages will be transformed into modern suburban neighborhoods where China's 1.4 billion people [in the year 2050] live and work. It could be the largest "megalopolis" in the world! :yes:

Mexico City seems quite small considering its population.

^^ Why do I get the feeling that Greater London is bigger area-wise compared to Metro Paris.
Because your feeling (sight!) is indeed fact. It's as though Paris is the most compact western city. Montreal's small metro network covers the same amount of area as Paris's network does. Paris is a superb city offering, for example, rewarding walks and appealing attitude lived out by its residents.

Great compilation, although I'd have been more inclined to crop London's image.

Mexico City seems quite small considering its population.

I know you see all these images on this site of large dense sprawling suburbs as far a the eye can see...

beijing is so small, smaller than most main city in the world, seems only 1/20 of tokyo metro.

根本不是同一比例尺，你不能自己用GE看看？

SEOUL is amazing, so small an area for 23 million people! I heard as country S. Korea is the densest place on the planet if you take account of inhabited land.

HK-Shenzhen too with 18 million.

It can go to over 30 million if you include The Pearl River Delta metro area. That includes, Macao, Guangzhou and Dongguan.

Grave mistake to include the rest of the Pearl River Delta as part of any population analysis with Hong Kong in it. There's a border between the two, and only one side can freely travel into the other. The two entities are very different.

*Utsunomiya-Omiya-Tokyo-Yokohama-Shizouka-Nagoya-Kyoto-Osaka-Hiroshima-Fukuoka Megalopolis

^^ Or, better yet, Sendai-Utsunomiya-Omiya-Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohoma-Shizouka-Nagoya-Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe-Hiroshima-Fukuoka Megalopolis. ;)

^^ Or, better yet, Sendai-Utsunomiya-Omiya-Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohoma-Shizouka-Nagoya-Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe-Hiroshima-Fukuoka Megalopolis. ;)

:ohno:
Omiya fusioned with other cities in 2001, now it is Saitama city.

A better version :lol:
Sendai-Utsunomiya-Chiba-Saitama-Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohoma-Shizouka-Nagoya-Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe-Hiroshima-Fukuoka Megalopolis

cool...love it!:)
But what's the yellow thing on the BUENOS AIRES-pic?

impressive work, nice to see two Portuguese cities there (Lisbon and Porto)! And both are in a global scales if their true size is taken into account. both are often compared with other cities using their municipal population, which is unfair and unrealistic.

And yes, Tokyo is impressive, Seattle geography is awesome, and another wow for Houston - this city is really impressive, and seems underrated, I'm never impressed by NYC, but Houston impresses me!

^^ probably about a third of New york is hidden under tree cover,

Places such as virtually most of the New Jersey side and from Yonkers to White plains look like fields etc. but zoom in and you'll see rows of houses.



cool...love it!:)
But what's the yellow thing on the BUENOS AIRES-pic?

Thats the silt and mud from the river delta.

San francisco bay area is quite large, whats the population?


Surprisingly huge overbuilt expanses [in no, particular, order]:
2. San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area


Yeah,
The Bay Area covers a very long distance relative to other metropolitan areas around the world.

However,

Bay Area By the numbers
4.5 million Total acreage of Bay Area land
720,000 Total acreage of developed land

Source: Green Info Network Bay Area Protected Lands Database, Homebuilders Association of Northern California

We have 7 Million people living in 1100 square miles. Its just that most of us live on narrow slivers of land and small valleys bordered by hills and water. Thus forcing the need to build further out but more packed in then typical cities once you get say 40 miles out of DT.

Not bad.

Miami is LONG :D

That pic is of the 3 counties in South Florida: West Palm Beach in Palm Beach County; Ft. Lauderdale in Broward County; and Miami in Miami-Dade County. Similar to Tokyo-Yokohama or San Fran-Oakland
It's about 5 1/2 million people in the whole area.

beijing urban eara: 735 square KM
shanghai urban eara:610 square KM
while Newyork urban eara: 32400 square KM
beijing is the largest city in china, but still so small.
chinese old leaders still try their best to control the scale of the city, "shanghai is too big! we have to control shanghai population! or shanghai will be a chaos" they know what? i really hate our goverment, those old men.


NY's urban area is nowhere near 32,000kms squared Oliver. The sarky Brit in me was going to invite you to up it to a round figure of 40,000 on the basis that you may have missed a few upstate cottages or Long Island beach houses but seriously about 17,000 km sq. as a serious and in some way internationally comparable limitation is more realistic though still of course overstating the case.

^^ probably about a third of New york is hidden under tree cover,

Places such as virtually most of the New Jersey side and from Yonkers to White plains look like fields etc. but zoom in and you'll see rows of houses.





Thats the silt and mud from the river delta.


You raise a very interesting point helium and a point which in all honesty invalidates such images - fascinating though they be - as true reflectors of size.

Developed first world gentrified suburbs such as Long Island in NY or the London home counties have vast suburban areas with densish tree cover and "faux rural" roof colouring schemes. This is reflected as rural in images but in fact is on the ground experienced as mid density suburbia. Instance parts of southern long island or parts of northern Surrey and Western Essex in S-E England.

I'm never impressed by NYC, but Houston impresses me!

:nuts:

:lol:

I resized 'em exactly at the same scale (according the scale on the right of every pic)


the scale on the side is exactly how I measured mine, I'm pretty confident they're all as close to scale as they're gonna get

Mexico City seems quite small considering its population.

I think Mexico City is not in the same scale as other cities. Common Montevideo looks larger than Mexico City in those comparisons.
Montevideo has a population of 1,325,000 and Mexico City has 19 million in metro area.

tokyo and the conurbation is scary, is the mother of urbanity

buenos aires and sao paulo also look well defined

houston and dallas look very poorly urbanized, but inmensely sprawled

new york isn´t that impressive in the aerial aswell, but surely is at another level

sydney looks huge for a city it´s size perth too

montreal seems refined, even from an aerial

paris and london look almost the same in size

dubai looks like a long strip

seoul looks so tiny and compact

根本不是同一比例尺，你不能自己用GE看看？

小了也没什么不好啊, 看占地大小能看出什么来.

FYI:

The Bay Area is San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. It takes up a big part of that picture, even with being slightly truncated.

The paris one is visible more largely than London.

This type of thread is strongly discouraged.