Top 5 World's Largest Metropolitan Areas
One concept which measures the world's largest cities is that of the metropolitan area, which is based on the concept of a labor market area and is typically defined as an employment core (an area with a high density of available jobs) and the surrounding areas that have strong commuting ties to the core. There is currently no generally accepted, globally consistent definition of exactly what constitutes a metropolitan area, thus making comparisons between cities in different countries especially difficult.
One attempt at arriving at a consistently defined metropolitan area concept is the study by Richard Forstall, Richard Greene, and James Pick. The basic principles of their definition involve delineating the urban area as the core, then adding surrounding communities that meet two criteria: (1) Less than 35% of the resident workforce must be engaged in agriculture or fishing; and (2) At least 20% of the working residents commute to the urban core.
Based on their consistently defined metropolitan area criteria, they tabulate a list of the twenty largest metropolitan areas in 2003. As population figures are interpreted and presented differently according to different methods of data collection, definitions and sources, these numbers should be viewed as approximate. Data from other sources may be equally valid but differ due to being measured according to different criteria or taken from different census years.
| Rank | Metropolitan area | Country | Population | Area (km2) | Population Density (People/km2) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tokyo | Japan | 32,450,000 | 8,014 | 4,049 |
| 2 | Seoul | South Korea | 20,550,000 | 5,076 | 4,048 |
| 3 | Mexico City | Mexico | 20,450,000 | 7,346 | 2,784 |
| 4 | São Paulo | Brazil | 19,889,559 | 8,479 | 2,223 |
| 5 | New York City | United States | 19,750,000 | 17,884 | 1,104 |
| 6 | Mumbai | India | 19,200,000 | 2,350 | 8,170 |
| 7 | Jakarta | Indonesia | 18,900,000 | 5,100 | 3,706 |
| 8 | New Delhi | India | 18,600,000 | 3,182 | 5,845 |
| 9 | Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto | Japan | 17,375,000 | 6,930 | 2,507 |
| 10 | Shanghai | China | 16,650,000 | 5,177 | 3,216 |
| 11 | Manila | Philippines | 16,300,000 | 2,521 | 6,466 |
| 12 | Hong Kong | Hong Kong, China | 15,800,000 | 3,051 | 5,179 |
| 13 | Los Angeles | United States | 15,250,000 | 10,780 | 1,415 |
| 14 | Kolkata | India | 15,100,000 | 1,785 | 8,459 |
| 15 | Moscow | Russia | 15,000,000 | 14,925 | 1,005 |
| 16 | Cairo | Egypt | 14,450,000 | 1,600 | 9,031 |
| 17 | Buenos Aires | Argentina | 13,170,000 | 10,888 | 1,210 |
| 18 | London | United Kingdom | 12,875,000 | 11,391 | 1,130 |
| 19 | Beijing | China | 12,500,000 | 6,562 | 1,905 |
| 20 | Karachi | Pakistan | 11,800,000 | 1,100 | 10,727 |
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, metropolitan, areas and/or population:
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—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“In metropolitan cases, the love of the most single-eyed lover, almost invariably, is nothing more than the ultimate settling of innumerable wandering glances upon some one specific object.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“Like other cities created overnight in the Outlet, Woodward acquired between noon and sunset of September 16, 1893, a population of five thousand; and that night a voluntary committee on law and order sent around the warning, “if you must shoot, shoot straight up!””
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)