This is a list of the world's largest cities in population, ordered by several ranking methods. Determining the world's largest cities depends on which definitions of "city" and "size" are used, and how those definitions are applied. The "size" of a city can refer its land area, but it is more typically the population. How one defines the land area of a city, however, is key to determining its population.
Read more about World's Largest Cities: Common Methods For Defining The Boundaries of A City, Cities Making The Top 20 in A List, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words world, largest and/or cities:
“My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: “If you truly love me, kill the bartender.””
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.... It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)