Which cities are MEGACITIES?

[capslock]

Originally Posted by Checker

To make athing clear:

London city population: 7.5million
Paris city population: around 10million

London metro: 12miilion maybe 16(but thats also a very stretched number and would include citys like Brighton on the british south coast.)
Paris metro: 12 to 15 million.

Moscow city population: well over 10million
metro: should be around 17 to 18 million

Still not quite right.... there was a thread on this before that Justme took the lead on which very thoroughly went through the different definitions used in different countries and then compared like with like for all European cities.

Your city populations look about right (if you call them urban populations), although some put London closer to 8 million these days. Paris does come out bigger on this measure due to the structure of the city, as many have already said up-thread.

You've then taken London's urban (or perhaps administrative) area and called it the metro area. London's metro area is I believe about 16 / 17 million compared to Paris's 15million or so - and no, that doesn't include Brighton.

The thread I talked about just now also looked at taking the equibalent of the US's CMSA population count and there were arguments that you could stretch London's sphere of influence out further to the point where it measured 21 million or so, but to me this was always more of an academic exercise and mainly to put to bed the believe that all American cities were SO much larger than European.

The thing to remember with all of these is that the old model of a city within it's walls surrounded by fields doesn't work any more. You cannot compare places like the Ruhr with the Randstad with London just on their populations alone, without understanding the very different urban structures that underpin them. Then again there are cultural issues too. In the UK, Manchester and Liverpool are very close to physically merging - does that mean they feel like one city? Quite the opposite.