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:
“The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
“I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list.”
—Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
“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 planet on which we live is poorly organized, many areas are overpopulated, others are reserved for a few, technology’s potential is only in part realized, and most people are starving.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)