Indonesia’s Jakarta now the world’s largest city, Tokyo falls to third: UN

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

On the one hand Yuri, on the other hand a reputed international organization like the OECD which has worked with statisticians and urban scientists/geographers for years to develop a harmonized definition of metro areas. Which am I gonna choose?

(...)

Sure. UN is also a reputed international organization (way more than the pretentious OECD) and yet bring a 41 million people Jakarta and a 17 million people Mexico City on the same list... It speaks for itself...

My favourite hobby is screening population data over all different kinds of geography and time period everywhere in the world and I'm confident that I'm much better on this than an OECD bureaucrat that can't even place those places on a map and it's only there due political indication.

Anyway, I like to play with different kinds of definitions and I have several Paris, several London (and any city in the world as I'm not geographic biased). Here a series of Paris (all population for 2022, but I have for 2015, 2007, 1999, 1990, 1982, 1975 and before way back to 1801, you pick):

PARIS - 762 km²
6,862,396 inh.

PARIS - 2,853 km²
10,949,749 inh.

PARIS - 5,841 km²
11,388,238 inh.

PARIS - 12,011 km²
12,380,964 inh.

PARIS - 13,355 km²
12,668,129 inh.

--------------------------------------------

Here for London (2021 population). And again, I'm not arguing which should be physically larger, but those numbers give us a sense of how many people live in and around those old two metropolises.

LONDON - 966 km²
6,886,883 inh.

LONDON - 1,572 km²
8,799,728 inh.

LONDON - 1,957 km²
9,426,220 inh.

LONDON - 2,170 km²
9,775,759 inh.

LONDON - 2,938 km²
10,694,252 inh.

LONDON - 2,073 km² (grouping of UAs around London, that's why the smaller size and higher population; empty spaces excluded)
12,056,039 inh.

LONDON - 5,747 km²
12,697,101 inh.

LONDON - 7,312 km²
13,250,179 inh.

LONDON - 4,769 km² (official urban agglomeration)
14,035,011 inh.

LONDON - 9,103 km²
14,595,583 inh.

LONDON - 11,190 km²
15,670,193 inh.

LONDON - 12,162 km²
15,876,845 inh.

LONDON - 17,586 km²
17,915,145 inh.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Sure. UN is also a reputed international organization (way more than the pretentious OECD) and yet bring a 41 million people Jakarta and a 17 million people Mexico City on the same list... It speaks for itself...

The Functional Urban Area has been defined and refined for more than 15 years now, involving hundreds of scholars, geographers, urban scientists, statisticians (Eurostat in particular), etc. It's not a OECD thing (in fact the OECD was just a facilitator, as it often is, and not the mastermind). I suggest you should read the numerous literature about FUAs, as you don't seem familiar with it. It cannot be compared with the UN urban areas, whose work generates far less research and literature. The only difference basically is the UN is inclusive of all countries, whereas the OECD does not include all countries. That's the only advantage that the UN Population Division has compared to OECD, but for the rest it pales in comparison of the research generated by the FUAs.

[Yuri]

FUA is only one of thousands of ways to measure metropolitan areas. There is not a single universal definition and probably will never be. Any post-doctoral thesis can be written on it and might bring yet another definition.

I think any definition that would make Paris metropolitan area 10x bigger than London is problematic. And sadly that’s the only reason you like this particular definition.

The closest thing the French government has for metropolitan areas is that one where Paris shows 10.9 million inh within 2,853 km2, not this gargantuan Paris metropolitan area which is almost the size of Belgium whereas in London Heathrow is barely within it.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Yuri

FUA is only one of thousands of ways to measure metropolitan areas. There is not a single universal definition and probably will never be. Any post-doctoral thesis can be written on it and might bring yet another definition.

The FUA is the most used definition of metro areas in the world. It is used by hundreds of researchers and institutions, as opposed to Yuri's definition of metro areas, only used by Yuri during his spare time.

Originally Posted by Yuri

The closest thing the French government has for metropolitan areas is that one where Paris shows 10.9 million inh within 2,853 km2, not this gargantuan Paris metropolitan area which is almost the size of Belgium whereas in London Heathrow is barely within it.

You talk about things you don't master well. France's INSEE (national statistical institute) has been using the OECD's FUA for more than 5 years now (as the FUA is the definition of metro areas used by Eurostat and the recommended guideline for European statistical agencies). Spain's INE also uses the FUA. In France it's called AAV (aires d'attraction des villes). In Spain it's called AUF (Áreas Urbanas Funcionales).

On the OECD website (for the year 2016):



On the INSEE website (for 2016):



On the INE website, here for Barcelona and Madrid in 2022 for instance:



Exactly the same figures as on the OECD website:



The Swiss statistical office also uses the FUA definition (they call them "zones urbaines fonctionnelles" in French): https://www.bfs.admin.ch/asset/fr/13787290

Etc.

[kittyhawk28]

Originally Posted by Yuri

People bashed both Jakarta and Dhaka, but they're in completely levels of development. A quick read on Wikipedia show how Jakarta is miles ahead in terms of infrastructure and economy. Jakarta, however, still lags behind the biggest Latin American metropolises though.

And about UN list is completely incoherent: some cities are oversized other undersized. They can't keep any consistency across the board. I don't understand why is so hard! Dozens of forumers here could put together a much better list.

The UN list is very strict (especially with the 1500 pp/sq km threshold) to the point it creates some weird trends.

For example, if you scroll down to page 121 of the report, for America's 2 largest cities it lists NYC as having just 13.92 million, and LA as having 12.74 million people as of 2025, a smaller gap than any other source I've seen yet. Moreover, it projects LA as overtaking NYC by 2050, with LA growing to 13.86 million vs. NYC declining to 13.23 million. Chicago isn't even on the list as it supposedly has < 5 million in its urban area as defined by the UN

[kittyhawk28]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

That's because their new definition of urban areas is essentially BS. They come up with this new definition and suddenly Paris has less than 10 million people and is not a megacity anymore. In the world of statistics, when a definition (however perfect it seems on paper) leads to slightly crazy results in practice, the first thing the statistician should do is ask oneself some questions about the validity of that definition.

In any case, urban areas have long stopped being relevant to measure the real extent of cities, at least since the mass use of cars in the western world, with lots of people now living in totally detached communities part of the commuter belt but still nonetheless part of the wider metropolis in every sense. This is less of a concern in Third World countries where people are too poor to have cars and live in commuter belts, but it makes a big difference in developed countries. That's why we've created the concept of "metropolitan area".

For a long time, there was no standard definition of what a metro area was, each country had their own definitions, which made comparisons difficult, but the OECD has now come with a standard international definition of metro areas, the so-called "Functional Urban Area" (basically a dense core + all contiguous areas around it where more than 15% of the working population commute to the core area).

Unfortunately they make the calculations only for the cities in the OECD countries, but here are the largest metro areas in those countries as per the OECD (as of 2020, last year for which we have data for all cities):
- Tokyo: 36,680,575
- Seoul: 24,078,693
- Mexico City: 20,535,317
- New York: 19,827,708
- Los Angeles: 17,812,851
- Osaka: 16,840,050
- Istanbul: 13,858,705
- Paris: 13,125,142
- London: 12,451,423
- Chicago: 9,424,738

Where did you get these figures exactly? I can't seem to find them from OECD sources.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by kittyhawk28

Where did you get these figures exactly? I can't seem to find them from OECD sources.

Here.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Hard to imagine nowadays that some of those like Manchester, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Berlin used to be among the largest cities in the world.

I mean, Vienna, at least to me, feels like a grand city of the highest rank. It was the imperial center of a great empire and one of the most cosmopolitan places on the planet.

Manchester, obviously no. An overgrown industrial boomtown.

[muppet]

Manchester : hold mah pint

Them thar bombs that did tha wrecking, nowt city planning

[llamaorama]

Manchester is characterized as a small city but I don't think that's accurate. If all the cities in Northern England were counted as a single metropolitan area it would be the same size as Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston in roughly the same geographic area. 7.5 million population. Google Maps measure distance tool says its 65 miles from Birkenhead to Leeds and it's also 65 miles from the SW Fort Worth suburbs (Benbrook) to the NE corner of Dallas' suburbs (McKinney).

I don't know if Northern England ever thinks of itself as a unified metropolitan area, but I would think in a modern context where most people own cars and will commute a long away and businesses and delivery services will put an office or warehouse to serve a whole region, then it basically could be.

[muppet]

Seriously though, you're right Manchester doesn't hold a candle to imperial Vienna, which at the time was buit as the capital to one of Europe's great empires. If the Hapsburgs hadn't imploded, Vienna would have continued as the capital of the equivalent to 10 countries today, and could have become the size of London or Paris, Moscow or Istanbul.

Manchester however, was a 'new' kind of city -industrial, and studded by a horizon of terraces and smokestacks. Popularised by Lowry's paintings which showed a hinterland of factories:





However the riches that brought in was enough to build itself a grand centre still, separate from the proletarian workhouses surrounding it - a formal grid of grand squares, hotels, department stores and a thicket of clocktowers (replacing the churches of old), funded by mercantile dynasties. All criss-crossed by the modernity of trams, cars and overhead railways -it was one of the places that constantly reminded everyone they were the 'second city of empire' (...alongside Birmingham, Glasgow, Calcutta, Shanghai lol). So marked was the difference between the grandiosity of the core and the conditions of the rest it inspired Marx and Engels, who studied in the city, to write the Communist Manifesto.


Like the Hapsburgs, WWI proved the beginning of the end for empire, with WWII sealing it. The grand centre was bombed, the industry died and population decline set in, that's only recently reversed.



https://originalpaintings.com/media/07_oxford_street_manchester_1938_20x16_508x407mm-1200x1500.jpg, www.victorianweb.org


Today the city's revived as a media centre, and its built up area home to 3 million.

[muppet]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

Manchester is characterized as a small city but I don't think that's accurate. If all the cities in Northern England were counted as a single metropolitan area it would be the same size as Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston in roughly the same geographic area. 7.5 million population. Google Maps measure distance tool says its 65 miles from Birkenhead to Leeds and it's also 65 miles from the SW Fort Worth suburbs (Benbrook) to the NE corner of Dallas' suburbs (McKinney).

I don't know if Northern England ever thinks of itself as a unified metropolitan area, but I would think in a modern context where most people own cars and will commute a long away and businesses and delivery services will put an office or warehouse to serve a whole region, then it basically could be.

Yep, northern England is aka as the Northern Powerhouse -main cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield in a line at top.

They're part of a ring of cities surrounding the Peak district national park - Birmingham's in the south (another 3 million), but the Midlands cities are never considered part, though their metros merge:

[Docere]

These are all long-established cities though with their own identities, and not a conurbation.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Hard to imagine nowadays that some of those like Manchester, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Berlin used to be among the largest cities in the world.

All except Manchester would strike me as having been global top 10s at some point between the mid-18th and mid-20th centuries. However, I didn't realize that Liverpool and Manchester were larger cities than Birmingham until the early 20th century.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

Manchester is characterized as a small city but I don't think that's accurate. If all the cities in Northern England were counted as a single metropolitan area it would be the same size as Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston in roughly the same geographic area. 7.5 million population. Google Maps measure distance tool says its 65 miles from Birkenhead to Leeds and it's also 65 miles from the SW Fort Worth suburbs (Benbrook) to the NE corner of Dallas' suburbs (McKinney).

I don't know if Northern England ever thinks of itself as a unified metropolitan area, but I would think in a modern context where most people own cars and will commute a long away and businesses and delivery services will put an office or warehouse to serve a whole region, then it basically could be.

Manchester is not a metro area of 7.5 million people for the same reason that London is not a metro area of 14 or 16 million people despite what Yuri wishes it to be.

The reason for that is because England, like the Benelux and the Rhine Valley, is extremely densely populated (we're talking of South Korean population density, higher than Japan). In those areas, cities are close to each other, and there are so many people everywhere that each city is its own metro area and labor pool all by itself. So the metro areas tend to be much smaller than in empty countries like US, France, Spain where cities sprawl endlessly across some empty countryside.

No one in Yorkshire (Leeds) would think of themselves as belonging to some "Manchester metro area". The city is a foreign to them as Houston is to Dallas. Ditto for Antwerp vs Brussels, say. Or Aachen vs Liège.

And it shows in the commuting patterns. You have only a very small percentage of people from Leeds or Liverpool commuting to Manchester and vice versa. Same for all those new towns that were created after WW2 at a distance of 30 to 60 miles from London (like Medway or Crawley or Harlow). They are all their own labor pool, and only small percentages of people commute to London.

Regarding Manchester, its metro area as defined by OECD and Eurostat (central core + commuter belt with more than 15% of working people commuting to the central core) had 3,399,000 inhabitants in 2020. Leeds-Bradford had 2,666,000 inhabitants. Liverpool 1,549,000 inhabitants.

But Manchester, like Leeds-Bradford and Birmingham, is a polycentric metro area, with several cores, so I'm not sure if you visit downtown Manchester you'll have the impression of a metro area of 3.4 million people (which would be Hamburg for instance, or Lisbon). Probably "feels" smaller than either Hamburg or Lisbon.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by muppet

If the Hapsburgs hadn't imploded, Vienna would have continued as the capital of the equivalent to 10 countries today, and could have become the size of London or Paris, Moscow or Istanbul.

Unlikely considering that Vienna was only half the size of Berlin in 1914, and Berlin hasn't grown to be the size of Paris or London.

If the Habsburg empire had evolved into a democratic confederation (big "if"), Vienna could perhaps be as big as Barcelona or Milan today, but I can't imagine it being as large as Madrid, let alone Paris or London, due to the population pool of these countries (with each their own capital city, Prague, Budapest, Zagreb).

[muppet]

Polite reminder, US style metro definitions are not measured by commuting patterns into the city core either, but into the adjacent county along and as low as 10%, which is how you daisy-chain everything into one much wider area the size of small countries. This has even lower commuting ratios now from when the metro definitions were first coined back in the day, given the rise of suburban office parks and wfh in the past 20 years.

Also identity alone is not what a city maketh -the residents of Yokohama may not regard themselves as Tokyoites (perish the thought!), but they are one and the same as far as the contiguous built entity.

I think the greatest reason you wouldn't consider these Northern English cities the same would be on built contiguity. For example Liverpiool and Manchester share the same 'metro' hinterlands but they're still separated, not contiguous:



And rightfully mentioned, the whole of England could be knitted up. It fits about 55 million people into the size of Pennsylvania. The bitty-ness of the picture above wouldn't normally stop there, but could carry on all the way south to London and the coast.

[Mad_Nick]

Originally Posted by kittyhawk28

The UN list is very strict (especially with the 1500 pp/sq km threshold) to the point it creates some weird trends.

For example, if you scroll down to page 121 of the report, for America's 2 largest cities it lists NYC as having just 13.92 million, and LA as having 12.74 million people as of 2025, a smaller gap than any other source I've seen yet. Moreover, it projects LA as overtaking NYC by 2050, with LA growing to 13.86 million vs. NYC declining to 13.23 million. Chicago isn't even on the list as it supposedly has < 5 million in its urban area as defined by the UN

I think this is simply a reflection of many US suburbs basically being rural areas by global standards. LA's suburbs are denser than NYC's once you get out of the urban core because of the geographical constraints of LA. Chicago has a dense core, but its suburbs are also basically rural areas by international standards.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by muppet

Polite reminder, US style metro definitions are not measured by commuting patterns into the city core either, but into the adjacent county along and as low as 10%, which is how you daisy-chain everything into one much wider area the size of small countries.

That's the US definition of metro areas (MSA), but that's not the international definition of metro areas. The international definition (FUA) is: a- a central core defined by density, plus b- a commuter belt where more than 15% of the population in employment commutes to the central core.

The Manchester FUA had 3.4 million people in 2020. This compares to the Minneapolis FUA (3.6 million) or the San Diego FUA (3.3 million).

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by muppet

Polite reminder, US style metro definitions are not measured by commuting patterns into the city core either, but into the adjacent county along and as low as 10%, which is how you daisy-chain everything into one much wider area the size of small countries. This has even lower commuting ratios now from when the metro definitions were first coined back in the day, given the rise of suburban office parks and wfh in the past 20 years.

Some people are not familiarized with policentric metro areas... It's bizarre in such forum.

Rhine-Ruhr is a metro area with 12 million people recognized by the German government even though virtually no one commute from Dortmund to Bonn. Commute patterns is only one factor regarding metropolization.

Likewise, there are not many people living in the far east districts and working on the far west ones here in the "monocentric" São Paulo. And no one would argue a São Paulo neighbourhood wouldn't be part of São Paulo Metro Area.

And things are fluid: We can consider Manchester and Liverpool separated metro areas and we can also consider that there is a single metropolitan area called "Manchester-Liverpool" as we see on the map on the same way "Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto" is widely regarded as a single metropolitan area.