# Do you know all the big cities of your country?



## Küsel (Sep 16, 2004)

I thought Norrköping, Jönköping and Örebro are also over 80'000 and in the top 10.


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## staff (Oct 23, 2004)

Kuesel said:


> I thought Norrköping, Jönköping and Örebro are also over 80'000 and in the top 10.


Örebro and Norrköping is, I think. I'm not sure about Jönköping though.

Maybe some Swede want to look it up.


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## Küsel (Sep 16, 2004)

I was many times in Sweden, but mostly in the north or Stockholm  But I am also not sure about the city sizes - it's just that like in Finland or Norway that the municipalities are very big and I think they differ between "city pop" and "countryside pop" inside of the same town - makes also sense  So I don't know how many % really live in the urban center of these municipalities.


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## JayT (Sep 11, 2002)

AUSTRALIA (2003)

Sydney - 4.2 Million
Melbourne - 3.56 Million
Brisbane/GC - 2.2 Million

Perth - 1.43 Million
Adelaide - 1.1 Million

Newcastle - 501,678
Canberra - 357,656
Wollongong - 273,427
Sunshine Coast - 200,139


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## ncik (Nov 12, 2004)

^^ JayT, some people are going to complain about those figures.


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## JayT (Sep 11, 2002)

ncik said:


> ^^ JayT, some people are going to complain about those figures.


Yes I know - I rounded the figures up for Adelaide and Melbourne to make the look bigger


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## Küsel (Sep 16, 2004)

I think Melbourne is quite right while Sydney seems to be half a million too big.


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## SHiRO (Feb 7, 2003)

Kuesel said:


> For I was also living in Brazil, here what I remember as biggest metros (hope it's more or less right ):
> Sao Paulo 19mio
> Rio de Janeiro 11mio
> Belo Horizonte 5mio
> ...


Fortaleza is much bigger in any case. Metrowise it exceeds 3 million.
One wouldn't say though, cause when I was there it felt less urban than a medium sized city in the Netherlands like Eindhoven (200,000 city/800,000 metro).


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## SHiRO (Feb 7, 2003)

staff said:


> Sweden has no real big cities, as you may see.


It is my experience that European cities are more urban than many much bigger (in name) cities in the developing world.

In my previous post I mentioned Fortaleza which lists at 3 million, well it feels like maybe the same size as Palma de Mallorca or something, which is around 6 times smaller.

So while the likes of Stockholm obviously don't measure up to cities like Bangkok, Bogota or Tehran, they hold their own pretty good in the urbanity department against the non megapolis, secondary cities in the developing world IMO.

Not even talking about American cities which feel much much smaller still.


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## Justme (Sep 11, 2002)

Kuesel said:


> I think Melbourne is quite right while Sydney seems to be half a million too big.


Sydney looks ok. 4.2million is the Sydney Statistical Division usually defined as the metropolitan area. It covers approx 12,000km²+


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## Justme (Sep 11, 2002)

For German metropolitan area's as follows:

Rhein/Ruhr: 12million
incl: Dortmund, Köln, Bonn, Essen, Dusseldorf, etc
Frankfurt (Rhein/Main): 4.9million
Berlin: 4.3million
Hamburg: 3.5million
Munich: 3million
Leipzig/Halle: 2.5million
Stuttgart: 2.5million
Mannheim (Rhein/Neckar): 2.5million
Hannover: 1.1million
Bremen 1.1million
Dresden: 1million
Nurnberg: 1million
Chemnitz - Zwickau: 1million
Saarbrücken - Forbach: 1million

I am most familiar with Frankfurt's metro of cause, which includes many of the surrounding cities that I frequently visit.

I have visited most of the other cities, but only Munich is really well known as I used to visit every 2nd weekend for a period over a year.


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## ƒƒ (Dec 31, 2004)

1. Brussel 1.000.000
2. Antwerpen 450.000
3. Gent 240.000
4. Charleroi 220.000
5. Luik 200.000
6. Brugge 120.000
7. Namen 100.000
8. Bergen 90.000
9. Leuven 90.000
10. Kortrijk 80.000
etc.


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## Estboy (Jan 18, 2004)

Tallinn 400 000
Tartu 100 000
...
others cannot be called cities


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## dave8721 (Aug 5, 2004)

In a country the size of the U.S. its not possible for anyone to really keep up on all the big cities. Here is a list of the 50 different U.S. cities with metro populations over 1,000,000 people:

New York	21858830
Los Angeles	17516110
Chicago	9608458
Washington DC - Baltimore	8026807
San Francisco - San Jose	7159693
Philadelphia	5951797
Boston	5809111
Dallas - Fort Worth	5784645
Detroit	5425588
Miami - Ft. Lauderdale	5361723
Houston	5176061
Atlanta	4844526
Seattle	3763569
Phoenix	3715360
Minneapolis - St.Paul	3437464
Cleveland	2942303
San Diego	2931714
St. Louis	2824778
Denver	2609063
Tampa - St. Petersburg	2587967
Pittsburgh	2494949
Cincinnati	2100501
Portland, OR	2040258
Charlotte	2025541
Kansas City	1992836
Indianapolis	1939349
Orlando	1922412
Columbus, OH	1920601
San Antonio	1820719
Milwaukee	1709926
Virginia Beach - Norfolk	1701083
Providence	1628080
Las Vegas	1612258
Salt Lake City	1559230
Nashville	1457232
Austin	1377633
New Orleans	1359136
Louisville	1334002
Raleigh - Durham	1331555
Hartford	1298907
Jacksonville	1297892
Memphis	1250293
Buffalo	1237557
Oklahoma City	1200000
Birmingham, AL	1161382
Albany	1141637
Richmond, VA	1138234
Rochester, NY	1136263
Dayton, OH	1081164


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## Justme (Sep 11, 2002)

^ Year, know the problem. Here are the 75 metro regions in the EU over 1million
United Kingdom 
London: 18million
Manchester/Liverpool: 4.5million
Birmingham: 3million
Leeds/Bradford: 1.8million
Glasgow: 1.4million
Sheffield: 1.2million
Newcastle: 1.1million

Germany 
Rhein/Ruhr: 12million
Frankfurt (Rhein/Main): 4.9million
Berlin: 4.3million
Hamburg: 3.5million
Munich: 3million
Leipzig/Halle: 2.5million
Stuttgart: 2.5million
Mannheim (Rhein/Neckar): 2.5million
Hannover: 1.1million
Bremen 1.1million
Dresden: 1million
Nurnberg: 1million
Chemnitz - Zwickau: 1million
Saarbrücken - Forbach: 1million

France 
Paris: 12million
Lyon: 1.7million
Marseille: 1.5million
Lille: 1.2million
Toulouse: 1million
Nice: 1million
Bordeaux: 1million

Belgium
Brussels: 2.9million
Antwerp: 1.6million

Euroregion
Rhein-Maas (10,478km² - Germany/Netherlands/Belgium)*: 3.8million
(*includes Aachen, Maastricht, Liege)

Spain 
Madrid: 6million
Barcelona: 4.9million
Valancia: 1.7million
Sevilla: 1.4million
Alacant: 1.4million
Malaga: 1.3million
Bilbao: 1.2million

Italy 
Milan: 8.2million
Rome: 5million
Naples: 4.5million
Torino: 2.5million
Bari: 1.6million
Palermo: 1.2million
Catania: 1.1million
Salerno: 1.1million
Brescia: 1.1million
Florence: 1million 
Genoa: 1million
Bologna: 1 million
Bergamo: 1 million
Venice - Padua: 1million

Poland 
Katowice: 3.9million
Warsaw: 3.1million
Krakow: 1.5million
Lodz: 1.4million
Trojmiasto: 1.1million
Wroclaw: 1.1million

Czech Republic
Prague: 1.7million

Hungary
Budapest: 2.5million

Portugal 
Lisbon: 3.2million
Oporto: 1.3million

Greece 
Athens: 4.2million
Thessaloniki: 1million

Netherlands 
Rotterdam/The Hague: 3.4million
Amsterdam: 2million
Utrecht: 1million
(All above in Deltametropolis: 6.5million)
Brabantstad: 2.4million

Sweden 
Stockholm: 1.8million

Denmark 
Copenhagen (excluding Malmo): 1.8million*
(*Øresund region incl. Sweden: 3.5million)

Finland 
Helsinki: 1.2million

Ireland 
Dublin: 1.5million

Latvia 
Riga: 1.4million

Austria 
Vienna: 2.7million


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## Arpels (Aug 9, 2004)

cool Just kay:


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## SHiRO (Feb 7, 2003)

Yeah! The good old estimated EU metro area list.

A little update of more accurate figures:

Netherlands
Amsterdam: 2.5 million 
Rotterdam: 2 million
The Hague: 1.5 million
Utrecht: 1.2 million
(All above in Deltametropolis: 8 million)
Brabantstad: 2.5 million
Gelders Valley: 1.5 million (Arnhem/Nijmegen)

Rhein/Meuse: 3.8 million (NL-B-D)



Denmark 
Copenhagen (excluding Malmo): 1.8million

Copenhagen/Malmo: 2.8 million
(Øresund region: 3.6million)


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## Nouvellecosse (Jun 4, 2005)

These days, I wouldn't consider a metro below 3 mil to be a "big" city. And that's on the lower end. Under 1 mil is small, and between 1 and 3 is medium. After all, size is relative isn't it?


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## Justme (Sep 11, 2002)

SHiRO said:


> Yeah! The good old estimated EU metro area list.
> 
> A little update of more accurate figures:
> 
> ...


Thanks SHiRO, year, that list is a tad out of date these days. I should get around to update it. It is also a bit of a mix between standard metro's and the equivilent of CMSA metro's, but then, so is the American one I suppose.


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## Max BGF (Sep 24, 2003)

*Germany´s agglomerations (non-polycentric)*

This site offers lots of worldwide and national statistics as well as maps:

www.citypopulation.de

Name Adm. A E 2003-12-31 
1 Essen NW 5.788.460 
2 Berlin BE 4.170.487 
3 Stuttgart BW 2.615.702 
4 Hamburg HH 2.532.565 
5 München BY 1.920.063 
6 Frankfurt HE 1.902.815 
7 Köln NW 1.827.526 
8 Mannheim BW 1.575.427 
9 Düsseldorf NW 1.318.356 
10 Nürnberg BY 1.023.196 
11 Hannover NI 1.000.193 
12 Saarbrücken SL 953.870 
13 Bonn NW 893.583 
14 Bremen HB 855.764 
15 Wuppertal NW 840.648


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## kyenan (Mar 22, 2003)

Justme said:


> For German metropolitan area's as follows:
> 
> Rhein/Ruhr: 12million
> incl: Dortmund, Köln, Bonn, Essen, Dusseldorf, etc
> ...


I think 'Rhein/Ruhr' is quite comparable to London and/or Paris metros. Why don't we have a 'Rhein/Ruhr vs London or Paris (including metro)' thread?


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## kyenan (Mar 22, 2003)

Nouvellecosse said:


> These days, I wouldn't consider a metro below 3 mil to be a "big" city. And that's on the lower end. Under 1 mil is small, and between 1 and 3 is medium. After all, size is relative isn't it?


Yeah size matters. The size of city proper may not be that much significant because the definition of city can vary with countries. However, the size of metro area is what truely tells you the real size of the city, in both population and area.


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## london-b (Jul 31, 2004)

kyenan said:


> I think 'Rhein/Ruhr' is quite comparable to London and/or Paris metros. Why don't we have a 'Rhein/Ruhr vs London or Paris (including metro)' thread?


Because London and Paris would kick the 'Rhein/Ruhr's ass.


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## olli_ruhr (Aug 17, 2005)

Max BGF said:


> This site offers lots of worldwide and national statistics as well as maps:
> 
> www.citypopulation.de
> 
> ...


wow..
my hometown essen has in the metropolitain area 5.78 mio inhabitant..LOL

sorry.. i think they will make the people angry which are living in dortmund or duisburg.....

the 5.78 mio people are living in the ruhr-area (ruhrgebiet), which includes 3 cities with more than 500.000 inhabitants (Dortmund, Duisburg , Essen). the ruhr area is an urban area, but otherwise than other metropolitain areas the ruhr-area has no really urban "city centre". in the ruhr area are a lot of centres and the cities are totally independent......

true in this list is the population of the metropolitain area of frankfurt.. 1.9 mio and not 4,7 mio like other forumers wrote....


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## olli_ruhr (Aug 17, 2005)

kyenan said:


> I think 'Rhein/Ruhr' is quite comparable to London and/or Paris metros. Why don't we have a 'Rhein/Ruhr vs London or Paris (including metro)' thread?


we dont have a rhine/ruhr vs london or vs paris thread because the rhine-ruhr area is not a really urban area. than whole belgium or the whole netherlands must be an urban area....

there are 5 big indepentend cities in the rhine-ruhr area

cologne 980.000 inh.
essen 578.000 inh.
dortmund 577.000 inh.
duisburg 518.000 inh.


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## Justme (Sep 11, 2002)

olli_ruhr said:


> wow..
> my hometown essen has in the metropolitain area 5.78 mio inhabitant..LOL


I believe this is the Urban Area, not Metropolitan area. There is a vast difference between the two definitions.



olli_ruhr said:


> sorry.. i think they will make the people angry which are living in dortmund or duisburg.....


This is the main reason metropolitan area's in Germany have been slow to take off as a definition, and when they did, they used the logical steps of using a seperate name to call this metropolitan area. (e.g. Rhein Ruhr, Rhein Main etc)



olli_ruhr said:


> the 5.78 mio people are living in the ruhr-area (ruhrgebiet), which includes 3 cities with more than 500.000 inhabitants (Dortmund, Duisburg , Essen). the ruhr area is an urban area, but otherwise than other metropolitain areas the ruhr-area has no really urban "city centre". in the ruhr area are a lot of centres and the cities are totally independent......


This is actually quite common around the world. San Francisco is a very famous case. The city of San Francisco is not the largest in size, nor the largest in population of the cities within it's metro. In fact, it's not even the largest in economy, San Jose takes those titles now. To reflect this, the San Francisco metropolitan area takes the name similar to San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose CMSA (in fact, because of the importance of San Jose, many demographers are suggesting the name change to San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CMSA). A more common name is simply the "Bay Area", which is akin to something like the Rhein Main, or Rhein Ruhr. You would also see similar polycentric structures in the Bay Area as you would in the German polycentric metro's.



olli_ruhr said:


> true in this list is the population of the metropolitain area of frankfurt.. 1.9 mio and not 4,7 mio like other forumers wrote....


The 1.9million population figure is the Urban Area surrounding Frankfurt. This basically means the urban area until one reaches countryside. This is NOT a metropolitan area in any description or means.

The 4.7million (or more accurately 4.9million) region is the metropolitan area surrounding Frankfurt called the Rhein Main. Generally a metropolitan area is the region surrounding a city or group of cities that are connected to each other by some form of demographic means, usually commuting percentages and often also including economic influence and connections. These metropolitan area's do include vast area's of countryside, that is not a rarity, but the standard across the world. What is not a standard is any international method of calculating - each country uses their own methods (This is in fact true also with Urban Area's, and that can cause large differences in figures when transposing methods)

As mentioned above, Germany has been rather slow at taking up metropolitan area definitions, but it is starting to become popular as they are far more useful figures for business and government infrastructure than pure Urban Area figures. i.e. Potential business market place and labour force, infrastructure for governments & businesses etc.

(Urban Area is more important for ecological impact studies, which is why the U.N. prefers these).


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## Fallout (Sep 11, 2002)

In Poland (only city proper, we don't use metro areas, all from memory):

Warsaw 1.700.000
Lodz 780.000
Krakow 750.000
Wroclaw 640.000
Poznan 570.000
Gdansk 460.000
Szczecin 420.000
Bydgoszcz 380.000
Lublin 360.000
Katowice 330.000


Ok, im too lazy to do it further. Here's all Polish cities above 100.000 from wikipedia:

Rank Chng Name Population
2004 +/-1999 Jun 2004 1999 1900
1. Warsaw 1,690,821
2. Łódź 776,297 
3. Kraków 757,500 
4. Wrocław 636,854 
5. Poznań 573,003 
6. Gdańsk 460,524 
7. Szczecin 413,294 
8. Bydgoszcz 369,151
9. Lublin 355,953 
10. Katowice 321,616 
11. Białystok 291,917 
12. +1 Gdynia 253,651 
13. -1 Częstochowa 248,894 
14. Sosnowiec 229,207 
15. Radom 227,944 
16. Kielce 209,962 
17. +1 Toruń 208,386 
18. -1 Gliwice 201,186 
19. Bytom 199,219 
20. Zabrze 193,212 
21. Bielsko-Biała 177,219 
22. Olsztyn 173,350 
23. Rzeszów 158,987 
24. Ruda Śląska 147,838 
25. Rybnik 141,975 
26. Tychy 131,854 
27. Dąbrowa Górnicza 131,024 
28. +2 Opole 128,686 129,553 
29. -3 Wałbrzych 128,201 
30. -1 Płock 127,953 
31. -1 Elbląg 127,732 
32. Gorzów Wielkopolski 125,787 
33. Włocławek 120,440 
34. +2 Zielona Góra 118,707 
35. Tarnów 118,295 
36. -2 Chorzów 115,505 
37. +2 Kalisz 108,666 
38. -1 Koszalin 107,702 
39. -1 Legnica 106,254 
40. Grudziądz 99,793 
41. Słupsk 99,064 
42. Jastrzębie Zdrój 96,109 


Overall:
1 city above 1.000.000
4 cities between 500.000 and 1.000.000
7 cities between 250.000 and 500.000
27 cities between 100.000 and 250.000

Metro areas would be about 
Upper Silesia 4.0 million
Warsaw 3.0 million
Krakow 1.2 million
Lodz 1.2 million
Gdansk 1.0 million


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## staff (Oct 23, 2004)

dave8721 said:


> In a country the size of the U.S. its not possible for anyone to really keep up on all the big cities. Here is a list of the 50 different U.S. cities with metro populations over 1,000,000 people:
> 
> New York	21858830
> Los Angeles	17516110
> ...


Yeah, and a small European city (300.000) feels bigger than most of the cities above.


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## Küsel (Sep 16, 2004)

staff said:


> Yeah, and a small European city (300.000) feels bigger than most of the cities above.


Exactly! But it's because European cities are historically much denser in the city proper. Also because of land shortage especially in the Po valley, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium and the UK big suburban sprawls are less common (and more controlled by the government) than in the US.

Another fact is that European cities are mostly historically grown centers and thus also have a denser lifestyle. There were examples for funcional cities also in Europe but it was a failure. 

Third: public transport is an important factor for the growth and development of European cities in the last 50 years. Car-friendly planned cities such as Houston or Miami are close to an ecological collapse as are the baulieux in France or EE socially. A thread that also goes for a lot of American suburbs...

Forth: the morphology of American cities is different from the European ones: the concentration lies on the relatively small CBD (look at Chicago or LA) - the hights and density of buildings decreases volcano-shape-like with the distance to the center. In Europe you have the historical centers which play still an important role in commerce - surrounded by a belt of multifuncional neighbourhoods (living, working, shopping, leasure, social interactions...). Even the peripheric neighbourhoods often have a historical core. Clear that there are faceless functional new towns as I mentioned above but the density of historical villages and towns had a big influence on the morphology of European cities over centuries.


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## Max BGF (Sep 24, 2003)

Discussion (in German) (#207 ff)

Discussion´s preliminary result: differing views. 
One standpoint: Except for North America one cannot tell European cities to be more dense than others.


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## Cobain (Sep 11, 2002)

In Spain I know:

Madrid
Barcelona
Valencia

Still have to visit:

Zaragoza
Bilbao
Sevilla


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## PanaManiac (Mar 26, 2005)

*PANAMA*

*Ah, yes. Not unlike Singapore, Panama City (Pop. 1,225,000) the capital is the only "Big City" in my country. Almost half the country's population reside in the greater Panama City metro area near the canal. 

I keep track of the country's economic (and other) development(s) and population change via the internet. The development that fascinates me most is the vertical growth of the capital city. Currently there are 102 skyscrapers under varying stages of construction.The skyline is a veritable sea of cranes!*
:tiasd:


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