Large countries most dominated by capital/largest city

[mintgum84]

As a born and raised Oxonian, I am going to have to protest. Blackbird Leys is ****, but the rest is pretty awesome.

Tennis anyone?

[Harry]

Originally Posted by mintgum84

As stated, anything North of Bham is rubbish. Oxford & Bristol are the UK's gems.

I honestly don't know where to start with that.

So I won't.

[mintgum84]

C'mon dude, its not literally true - obviously. Durham is a nice town, Lancaster is ok too. But broadly speaking, the south is way nicer then the north.

[Rascar]

Mintgum, if landscape and countryside is your thing the north is better. Ditto varied cities with their own identities. Southern accents and identities have become rather homogonised somewhere between r.p. and estuary.

[mintgum84]

A uniform, decent Southern drawl is better then that Northern stuff.

[Pennypacker]

"Southern drawl" is an America-specific term and certainly doesn't apply to most Southern English accents.

[Cherguevara]

Originally Posted by CigaretteSmoker

England is very much dominated by London, and the wealth is disproportionately centred on London.

As the vast majority of tourists to the UK only ever visit London and surrounding towns such as Oxford, etc, I think they get an inaccurate representation of the prosperity of England.

If they visited Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, etc, they would get a very different perspective of English prosperity and wealth.

Or indeed if they visited large parts of London.

[SE9]

^ which they do. There's currently a very large contingent of young Chinese people staying in and around my South London neighbourhood.

Originally Posted by Rascar

Mintgum, if landscape and countryside is your thing the north is better. Ditto varied cities with their own identities. Southern accents and identities have become rather homogonised somewhere between r.p. and estuary.

Accents here are moving and shifting. A new "inner London accent" is growing and replacing Cockney, which has been shifted out into Essex. I'd argue that the different identities in the south (south coast towns vs. Chiltern vs. Essex/Cockney etc.) still stay individual.

[mintgum84]

I just meant a uniform Southern accent, you know, with elongated vowels et al.

[Nacho_91]

Argentina is the 8th largest country in the world but we only have a population of 40 million, and more than 12 millions in Greater Buenos Aires,

Other important cities are Córdoba, Rosario and Mendoza with more than 1 million, and Tucumán, La Plata, Mar del Plata, Salta and Santa Fe with more than 500.000 people.

[alexandru.mircea]

Originally Posted by Wapper

France is one of the best examples because almost everything happens in Paris (until a few years ago literally everything). Paris is the political, economical and cultural capital of the country and by far the largest city. Almost everything is decided there, while the rest of the country simply executes. Paris also has all major administrative schools. If you want to be someone in France, you should study in Paris.

That's not at all true. France has made tremendous progress in this respect in the last two decades. If you're want to be an engineer, you might be better off in Toulouse; if you want to be a doctor, you might want to choose Lille instead. The national administration school has been moved from Paris to Strasbourg in the '90s already if I'm not wrong. (Strasbourg has been boosted a lot by the European institutions.) Nantes is also a hub city for innovation. Grenoble has France's best research in several exact sciences (like biotechnologies). The national L'Etudiant portal rates the best places to study in France like this:
1. Toulouse 2. Grenoble 3. Montpellier 4. Marseille-Aix 5. Lyon 6. Bordeaux 7. Nantes 8. Rennes 9. Nice 10. (!!!) Paris

In terms of administration, France will never be a federal-type country, but if you go around the country and see the projects that the regional governments are undergoing you'll see that the "everything is decided in Paris" is just a self-perpetuating cliche nowadays.
In terms of population and economy, yes, Paris remains by far the largest urban agglomeration and the largest economy, BUT, in terms of percentage of the total population and economy, it is not that dominant when compared to several other countries.


EDIT: only realized it's an old thread and I was responding to an old post. I've been ninja'd several times.

Originally Posted by UnHavrais

Everything is centered on Paris in France !

The train :

---

The highways :


The wealth :


The tourism :


The population :


The atmospheric pollution :


The light pollution :


ETC...

All very good info, but you are missing the point though - this thread is not about cities that are #1 in their country and in every aspect, but about cities that are #1 to the extent that they take up the majority in each of those aspects. How "dominated" are the rest of France, considering they do make up about 82% of the population and about 71% of the country's GDP? Not a huge domination, I would say.

For comparison, Bucharest contributes about 23% of the country's GDP, 25% of the country's industrial production and almost a third of all the taxes paid in Romania - while containing only about 9% of the country's population. Also, purchase power in Bucharest is more than twice compared to the national average and, when compared to France, there is no equivalent of the regional governments (only an equivalent of the departments). In terms of population, Bucharest is about 2M, while the next level is that of cities at about 300k. That's fairly more dominant and centralized, which comes from centralized political planning of the country from the very beginning and absolutely no real effort in the opposite direction.

[geococcyx]

Originally Posted by sebvill

Is very typical for Brazilians to know nothing about what is going on in the rest of Latin America. You tend to enlarge what happens in Brazil and minimize neighbouring economies.

+1

[the spliff fairy]

Originally Posted by mintgum84

C'mon dude, its not literally true - obviously. Durham is a nice town, Lancaster is ok too. But broadly speaking, the south is way nicer then the north.

I heard they opened a Marks & Spencer in Birmingham. The 'queues' were round the block, riot police n everything. Apparently a US Studio took the opportunity to shoot the next decade's worth of zombie apocalypse scenes from the roof.

Maybe.

[The Cake On BBQ]

Turkey is definitely an ultimate example of it. 80 million pop and 20 million of them living in Istanbul and cities surrounding it.

[VECTROTALENZIS]

South Korea is the ultimate example.
25 million living in metro Seoul while the country's pop is 50.

Thailand too. Bangkok is the only real city. The rest are only small towns.

[èđđeůx]

Originally Posted by The Cake On BBQ

Turkey is definitely an ultimate example of it. 80 million pop and 20 million of them living in Istanbul and cities surrounding it.

I red an article the other day about how Istanbul is overdue for an earthquake, and doesn't have a large percentage of its buildings prepared to withstand a large 7.0 one (for example). It'd be interesting if this were to happen, and large parts of the city flattened like the article mentioned.

[koolio]

Yes, it would be quite interesting to see thousands of people get flattened underneath massive amounts of rubble.

[andretanure]

What about Uruguay?

Montevideo - 1,336,878 people
Total of the country - 3 424 595 people

The second biggest city in Uruguay is Salto with 118 013 inhabitants, huge difference

[The Cake On BBQ]

Originally Posted by èđđeůx

I red an article the other day about how Istanbul is overdue for an earthquake, and doesn't have a large percentage of its buildings prepared to withstand a large 7.0 one (for example). It'd be interesting if this were to happen, and large parts of the city flattened like the article mentioned.

Government recently passed a law that allows to demolish buildings that aren't up to earthquake regulations.

It's planned to be enforced from 2013 but some demolitions already started in Istanbul.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showth...463427&page=17
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showth...587726&page=17

A lot of people are selling their homes and buyings newer ones.

Although I'm not sure if they can actually demolish all weak buildings, because a great deal of them are occupied by some really rich people (for their bosphorus view), and municipality/state can't simply force them to leave. Still, its a pretty big deal, and it's kind of gonna be like Hausmann thing for Istanbul.

[annaamazing]

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