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"The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people. reply" I did not believe this and googled it. It is true. 1 Million would be tiny in Chi

"The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people. reply" I did not believe this and googled it. It is true. 1 Million would be tiny in China. Province.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
There is no significance in counting only the people within an arbitrary geographic boundary that is a city’s legal jurisdiction. An airport serves a metropolitan region, composed of many cities, and there are at least 50 with 1M+ people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Counting "city population" is nearly a pointless exercise. What matters is the metro area, otherwise you get some pretty useless results. Austin, TX is tenth by city size in the US, with just under a million people, while San Francisco is 17th, with about 800k. But Austin is a much bigger percentage of the total Austin metro area, while the Bay area is ~8-10 million people total. As such, SF feels like a much bigger city in nearly every capacity.
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
  Yeah, it is basically always is a bit pointless without context. Same with e.g. Paris. Paris itself is "tiny". But Île-de-France (the Paris region) has over 12 million people.
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    Another one: just 7000 people live in the City of London
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      And Vatican has population of 524... With Rome's metropolitan area being 4,3 million... But maybe that is stupid comparison.
      - kirubakaran 3y ago
        Vatican also has 5.9 Popes per square mile, highest in the world
    - myrmidon 3y ago
      This is disingenuous; "City of London" is a tiny, central district of London. It is most emphatically NOT "London, the city", in exactly the same way that Civic center is not the city of San Francisco. It's just confusingly named.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - walthamstow 3y ago
        There is no other definition of London, the city. There's the Greater London region, which is 9m people, but that's it. Parliament, for example, is in the City of Westminster, one of 32 boroughs which (+ the City) make up Greater London.
        notatoad 3y ago
        When normal people talk about a city, they're talking about an urban area under the jurisdiction of a mayor and city council. that's exactly what "greater london" is, so when people talk about a city called London it's safe to assume they mean the 32 boroughs. "the city of london" is just a confusingly named area inside a city called "London", it's not a city.
        kersplody 3y ago
        It's more of a city state encircled by greater London. The City of London has a separate government and rights that predate England, inclusive of the right to opt out of any parliamentary law or ignore the mayor of Greater London. The City of London even considered remaining in the EU after the brexit vote, but it wasn't logistically feasible.
        walthamstow 3y ago
        > When normal people talk about a city, they're talking about an urban area under the jurisdiction of a mayor and city council. Normal people where? London has only had a mayor since 2000. Each borough has its own council, there is no London council. You don't know what you're talking about and you're projecting (North) American ideas onto other countries. > so when people talk about a city called London it's safe to assume they mean the 32 boroughs. Except it's not. Colloquially, some borough are not considered to be in London. Bromley, for example.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      That's not an example; you're just taking advantage of your hapless interlocutor's assumption that you're speaking English. The City of London and the city of London are distinct legal entities.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - mtalantikite 3y ago
    Sure, but Paris is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world, so Paris proper feels large even though it's only, what, 2 million people or so?
- mtalantikite 3y ago
  I'm not sure I'm following, are you saying that SF feels bigger than Austin because of the surrounding metro area? I guess I'd assume that feeling is from population density (SF being 18.5k/sq mi vs 3k/sq mi in Austin), rather than the metro area. But maybe that's because I'm a new yorker that doesn't have a license, so cities to me are what I can get to on foot, which means the denser they are the more like a real city it feels to me.
rockostrich 3y ago
Part of it is our definition of cities versus metro areas. Boston's population is technically only 650k but Boston proper doesn't even include Cambridge which is like not including one of the boroughs when talking about NYC's population. Granted, we still have a lot less metro areas with over 1 million people but there are still ~50 of them.
- dividefuel 3y ago
  Is this something fairly unique to the US or do other countries do this too? that is, having a city boundary that's relatively small compared to the metro area.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    I don't know if it's common to other countries, but a big factor in the US is race and class. There was a ton of "white flight" in the US starting in the 60s with white middle class and above fleeing cities to the suburbs. As such, they specifically did not want their adjacent town to be annexed by the major city. In plays out pretty comically in Austin TX in my opinion. You have these teeny affluent enclaves (search for "Sunset Valley", "Rollingwood" and "Westlake Hills" near/inside Austin) that anyone else would consider "part of Austin", but they don't vote in city elections or pay city taxes (but they certainly take advantage of all the benefits of being close to Austin...)
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Well, Paris is either very dense or not very depending on what arrondissements you're counting. London has The City, that doesn't even have many residents and then there's really the city core and greater London.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
    In Spain it happens as well. The official city population numbers quoted by most sources are actually the population of the city's municipality. Sometimes municipalities are large, including rural areas and small towns close to the city, while other times they are smaller and leave outside areas that are effectively boroughs of the city (you walk down a street and are in a different municipality, without even going through any non-urban area). Some years ago there was a project to merge municipalities, focusing especially on cases like that, but it failed spectacularly because it required consent from all municipalities involved and the smaller ones never wanted to merge (partly because it's advantageous for them to not pay big city taxes but still use their services, but I suspect mainly because mayors don't want to just give up their position and go find another job). This makes rankings by population rather biased and spawns many endless discussions on whether city X is bigger than its rival city Y (and sometimes it might actually have real-life consequences, say, when the central government comes up with some funds for cities of size greater than some threshold).
throwup238 3y ago
That’s because Chinese cities are bigger than US counties let alone individual cities. If you look at the list of most dense “cities proper” [1] China doesn’t even make the list because all of their cities include huge swathes of rural land. Beijing for example is over 6,000 square miles while NYC is only 300 sq mi and the city of LA is only 470 sq mi. The US has dozens of counties with more than a million people [2] and most are much smaller than Beijing or other Chinese cities. The only city that is comparable to an American one is Hong Kong, the rest are much bigger. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_pop... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_co...

"The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people. reply" I did not believe this and googled it. It is true. 1 Million would be tiny in China. Province.

lotsofpulp 3y ago

There is no significance in counting only the people within an arbitrary geographic boundary that is a city’s legal jurisdiction. An airport serves a metropolitan region, composed of many cities, and there are at least 50 with 1M+ people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Counting "city population" is nearly a pointless exercise. What matters is the metro area, otherwise you get some pretty useless results. Austin, TX is tenth by city size in the US, with just under a million people, while San Francisco is 17th, with about 800k. But Austin is a much bigger percentage of the total Austin metro area, while the Bay area is ~8-10 million people total. As such, SF feels like a much bigger city in nearly every capacity.

_fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
Yeah, it is basically always is a bit pointless without context. Same with e.g. Paris. Paris itself is "tiny". But Île-de-France (the Paris region) has over 12 million people.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  Another one: just 7000 people live in the City of London
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    And Vatican has population of 524... With Rome's metropolitan area being 4,3 million... But maybe that is stupid comparison.
    - kirubakaran 3y ago
      Vatican also has 5.9 Popes per square mile, highest in the world
  - myrmidon 3y ago
    This is disingenuous; "City of London" is a tiny, central district of London. It is most emphatically NOT "London, the city", in exactly the same way that Civic center is not the city of San Francisco. It's just confusingly named.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - walthamstow 3y ago
      There is no other definition of London, the city. There's the Greater London region, which is 9m people, but that's it. Parliament, for example, is in the City of Westminster, one of 32 boroughs which (+ the City) make up Greater London.
      - notatoad 3y ago
        When normal people talk about a city, they're talking about an urban area under the jurisdiction of a mayor and city council. that's exactly what "greater london" is, so when people talk about a city called London it's safe to assume they mean the 32 boroughs. "the city of london" is just a confusingly named area inside a city called "London", it's not a city.
        kersplody 3y ago
        It's more of a city state encircled by greater London. The City of London has a separate government and rights that predate England, inclusive of the right to opt out of any parliamentary law or ignore the mayor of Greater London. The City of London even considered remaining in the EU after the brexit vote, but it wasn't logistically feasible.
        walthamstow 3y ago
        > When normal people talk about a city, they're talking about an urban area under the jurisdiction of a mayor and city council. Normal people where? London has only had a mayor since 2000. Each borough has its own council, there is no London council. You don't know what you're talking about and you're projecting (North) American ideas onto other countries. > so when people talk about a city called London it's safe to assume they mean the 32 boroughs. Except it's not. Colloquially, some borough are not considered to be in London. Bromley, for example.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    That's not an example; you're just taking advantage of your hapless interlocutor's assumption that you're speaking English. The City of London and the city of London are distinct legal entities.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- mtalantikite 3y ago
  Sure, but Paris is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world, so Paris proper feels large even though it's only, what, 2 million people or so?
mtalantikite 3y ago
I'm not sure I'm following, are you saying that SF feels bigger than Austin because of the surrounding metro area? I guess I'd assume that feeling is from population density (SF being 18.5k/sq mi vs 3k/sq mi in Austin), rather than the metro area. But maybe that's because I'm a new yorker that doesn't have a license, so cities to me are what I can get to on foot, which means the denser they are the more like a real city it feels to me.

rockostrich 3y ago

Part of it is our definition of cities versus metro areas. Boston's population is technically only 650k but Boston proper doesn't even include Cambridge which is like not including one of the boroughs when talking about NYC's population. Granted, we still have a lot less metro areas with over 1 million people but there are still ~50 of them.

dividefuel 3y ago
Is this something fairly unique to the US or do other countries do this too? that is, having a city boundary that's relatively small compared to the metro area.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I don't know if it's common to other countries, but a big factor in the US is race and class. There was a ton of "white flight" in the US starting in the 60s with white middle class and above fleeing cities to the suburbs. As such, they specifically did not want their adjacent town to be annexed by the major city. In plays out pretty comically in Austin TX in my opinion. You have these teeny affluent enclaves (search for "Sunset Valley", "Rollingwood" and "Westlake Hills" near/inside Austin) that anyone else would consider "part of Austin", but they don't vote in city elections or pay city taxes (but they certainly take advantage of all the benefits of being close to Austin...)
- ghaff 3y ago
  Well, Paris is either very dense or not very depending on what arrondissements you're counting. London has The City, that doesn't even have many residents and then there's really the city core and greater London.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  In Spain it happens as well. The official city population numbers quoted by most sources are actually the population of the city's municipality. Sometimes municipalities are large, including rural areas and small towns close to the city, while other times they are smaller and leave outside areas that are effectively boroughs of the city (you walk down a street and are in a different municipality, without even going through any non-urban area). Some years ago there was a project to merge municipalities, focusing especially on cases like that, but it failed spectacularly because it required consent from all municipalities involved and the smaller ones never wanted to merge (partly because it's advantageous for them to not pay big city taxes but still use their services, but I suspect mainly because mayors don't want to just give up their position and go find another job). This makes rankings by population rather biased and spawns many endless discussions on whether city X is bigger than its rival city Y (and sometimes it might actually have real-life consequences, say, when the central government comes up with some funds for cities of size greater than some threshold).

throwup238 3y ago

That’s because Chinese cities are bigger than US counties let alone individual cities. If you look at the list of most dense “cities proper” [1] China doesn’t even make the list because all of their cities include huge swathes of rural land. Beijing for example is over 6,000 square miles while NYC is only 300 sq mi and the city of LA is only 470 sq mi. The US has dozens of counties with more than a million people [2] and most are much smaller than Beijing or other Chinese cities. The only city that is comparable to an American one is Hong Kong, the rest are much bigger. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_pop... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_co...