Where are largest cities in the world? 2015 edition

The number of people who live in a city, as we may have mentioned before, is surprisingly hard to work out. That’s partly because populations shift and change, unnoticed by demographers.

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Mostly, though, it’s because you quickly run into the fact that different authorities define their cities in entirely incompatible ways, rendering any attempt to compare them a bit like comparing apples with trucks. What you really need is a single source that follows a single set of rules: the results may not be perfect, but at least they’ll be consistent.

That’s where Demographia comes in. The St. Louis-based consultancy was founded by the urban planner Wendell Cox (who, unusually for someone in that line of work, likes to write articles for conservative publications about the benefits of private car ownership). It also has a website that is, with the best will in the world, not massively easy on the eye.

But every year Demographia publishes something rather good: the World Urban Areas Report, a sort of bumper book of city population stats. You can check out the 11^th edition here.

Here’s how it defines a city:

An urban area (“built-up urban area,” urbanized area or urban agglomeration) is a continuously built up land mass of urban development that is within a labor market (metropolitan area or metropolitan region). An urban area contains no rural land… [It] is best thought of as the “urban footprint” – the lighted area that can be observed from an airplane (or satellite) on a clear night.

This year’s edition of the World Urban Areas Report covers more than a thousand of the largest cities in the world, from Tokyo (pop. 37,000,000), right down to tiddlers like 850th-ranked Leicester (Pop. 534,000): all 1,009 cities, in fact, with a population of half a million of more.

Here are the top 10. See if you can spot any pattern.

 

Seeing it yet? Need a clue?

Okay, here’s the same chart again. This time, we’ve coloured the cities by continent.

 

Yep.

Asia’s dominance continues as you move down the league tables, too. Here’s the top 20:

 

The world’s largest continent, in fact, is home to 33 of the world’s 50 largest cities, and 50 of the top 100. After that we got bored and stopped counting.

This isn’t quite as extreme a result as it may appear: Asia, after all, is home to just shy of 60 per cent of the world’s population. So the way in which the 2.1bn people who live in cities of half a million souls or more are distributed around the globe is largely a function of where people actually live. Look:

Comparing those two graphs, you can see that the Americas and Australia are unusually urbanised, Africa unusually under-urbanised, and Europe and Asia are pretty close to what you’d expect.

There are two other striking things about these league tables.

China rules

The first is the dominance of China, which takes 12 places in the top 50, and 22 of the top 100.

Again, this shouldn’t be surprising – it’s the world’s most populous country, home to nearly a fifth of humanity – but nonetheless, it’s striking how many of these megacities you almost certainly haven’t heard of.

Where power lies

The other striking thing here is how far down the league tables many of the world’s most powerful cities fall. Here’s where some of the places that commonly make the “world city” league tables fall:

 

Size, it seems, isn’t everything.

The data

Here, for completism’s sake, is a chart showing the figures for all the city population charts above. You can find the full data set on Demographia’s website, here.

Rank	City	Population
1	Tokyo-Yokohama	37,843,000
2	Jakarta	30,539,000
3	Delhi	24,998,000
4	Maniilla	24,123,000
5	Seoul-Incheon	23,480,000
6	Shanghai	23,416,000
7	Karachi	22,123,000
8	Beijing	21,009,000
9	New York	20,630,000
10	Guangzhou-Foshan	20,597,000
11	Sao Paulo	20,365,000
12	Mexico City	20,063,000
13	Mumbai	17,712,000
14	Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto	17,444,000
15	Moscow	16,170,000
16	Dhaka	15,669,000
17	Cairo	15,600,000
18	Los Angeles	15,058,000
19	Bangkok	14,998,000
20	Kolkata	14,667,000
25	Shenzhen	12,084,000
28	Tianjin	10,920,000
29	Paris	10,858,000
31	Chengdu	10,376,000
32	London	10,236,000
37	Chicago	9,156,000
41	Dongguan	8,442,000
43	Wuhan	7,509,000
45	Hangzhou	7,275,000
46	Hong Kong	7,246,000
47	Chongqing	7,217,000
50	Quanzhou	6,710,000
57	Nanjing	6,155,000
58	Shenyang	6,078,000
59	Xi’an	5,977,000
62	Qingdao	5,816,000
68	Singapore	5,624,000
72	Suzhou	5,246,000
76	Zhengzhou	4,942,000
77	Washington DC	4,889,000
79	Harbin	4,815,000
89	Boston	4,478,000
90	Xiamen	4,420,000
94	Dalian	4,183,000
97	Berlin	4,069,000
99	Fuzhou	3,962,000
101	Dubai	3,933,000
299	Amsterdam	1,624,000
832	Geneva	599,000

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