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 |
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—Charlotte Bunch (b. 1944)
“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)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
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—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)