Thread: Berlin
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Old Posted Oct 25, 2008, 12:57 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by andi204 View Post
That's not true. Within the city limits Berlin has got about 3.5 Million inhabitants and Paris just like 2.5 Million, i think even less. Most people living in Paris are living in highly populous townships in the outside of the city limits.
If it would be true what you're trying to tell Berlin would have about 4.5 Million inhabitants, since the city has got larger towns in its suburbs. For example Potsdam belongs to the city are of Berlin but is situated outside the city limits so it does not count to Berlin's population.

And you might be right in the fact that Berlin as we know today was founded in the 20s out of several towns but today it's one city.
Thanks to our politicians we won't have this discussion anymore maybe when they are really going to combine the two federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg.

Need some proves?

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_d...%A4dte_Europas

Btw you should read more carefully.
I wrote: "With 3.5 million inhabitants within its city limits Berlin is the Germany's largest city by population and size and the 2nd largest city in the European Union."
...
Within its city limits
WITHIN
I guess you probably don't want yet another poster bringing this up again, but really, it does hit a raw nerve when some people do this.

New Brisavoine has a good point. You are on an international forum and not every country hangs onto the council area population when defining cities. Although you are correct in that Berlin's city proper council area is one of the largest in Europe, not everyone considers invisible political borders to be the defining factor. Paris may have a smaller population by council area than Berlin but it is a much larger city.

You must keep in mind that on an International forum, people from other parts of the world may see things differently. For instance, would you consider Aachen to be larger than Sydney? Most Germans think of Aachen to be a city of 258,000 people. This is actually larger than Sydney which has within it's council area 167,000 people. Which city do you consider larger? Or in this case, do you take all of Sydney's urban area population or it's metro area population. If you honestly consider Berlin to be larger than Paris, then surely you must use this rule for everything and consider Aachen to be larger than Sydney. The 4.2million we usually hear for Sydney is in fact it's metro area that covers 12,000km² (which incidentally, compares with Frankfurt's metropolitan area of the Rhein Main which has 5.2million in roughly the same area coverage)

I believe the Berlin Urban area has around 3.7million people and it's metropolitan area covers around 5,370km² and has around 4.2million people. The reason Berlin's metro area is smaller in size to say Frankfurt or Sydney is that unlike these cities which are surrounded by many other urban area's spreading out in pockets quite far away and connected by economic and commutable ties, the urban satellites around Berlin thin out very quickly.

By the way, I saw on later posts that you insist that Berlin is the second largest city in the EU. This is all very good at technical levels regarding demographics based on political boundary's. But if you insist that Berlin is a bigger city than Paris you are completely wrong.

Quote:
Originally Posted by andi204 View Post
Btw²:
The German word for City is "Großstadt", Town is "Stadt". And here in Germany only the areas within the city borders belong to the City/Großstadt.
What you understand under "city" would be "Verdichtungsraum" or "Metropolregion" in German.
Ah, yes, but you are on an International English speaking forum here, and the word "City" can mean anything from city proper, urban area or entire metropolitan area. By the way, according to the German standard, Perth, Australia is a tiny village of 11,573 people. Damn impressive skyline for such a small village

Anyway, that shouldn't distract from this excellent thread and wonderful photos you have been posting. We just needed to clear up the differences here when comparing cities internationally.

I particularly like how you have shown sat maps of the areas where the photos come from. I consider Berlin to be my favourite city in Germany and always enjoy seeing photos from it. So, I'll keep an eye out on this thread and hope to see your posts continue
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