Talk:List of cities proper by population/Archive 7

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Sydney Does not belong on this list, It belongs on its own sublist of this page

The city proper of Sydney since the year 2004 has only consisted of Historical downtown Sydney and South Sydney as the city limits. Even cleveland ,Ohio is vastly bigger then Sydney Austral in Land area. But in population Density its closer to 5,000 people per mile in its city proper. Sydney never created a new Sydney County like the British did in 1963. There fore Sydney has never united to become greater city and Couty of Sydney ,Australia. Its always been City of Sydney meaning just downtown plus near areas. 99.45.130.77 (talk) 19:02, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

This article shows the area that the Australian Bureau Statistics defines as Sydney Sydney city proper. You're confusing it with the City of Sydney, which is one local government area in Sydney. --AussieLegend (✉) 23:21, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

The greater region of Sydney is significantly larger than Cleveland, Ohio. AussieLegend is correct in saying that you're mistaking it as the City of Sydney which is the council area that covers the Sydney CBD. The greater Sydney region is all a part of the city of Sydney... 110.148.188.229 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 04:54, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Having read the definition used in this article it appears I made a mistake. This article deals with the actual city of Sydney, not the ABS definition, which is somewhat unrealistic. Regardless, it still isn't the LGA. --AussieLegend (✉) 10:16, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Bangkok is to be included. Pavel Senatorov, developer of programming language Ya (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 08:07, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Reference standardization

Hi there folks. I think that we should standardize reference. I mean every population figure should get it's data from UN or somewhere like that but from only one source. Cause that table changes regularly and ome of them contains wrong or not-well referenced figures. You guys agree? elmasmelih (used to be KazekageTR) 08:58, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

Absolutely. It would also give a sense of credibility, seeing as there's no good "universal standard" to measure cities by and we often end up comparing apples to oranges no matter what definitions we use. Someone the Person (talk) 18:02, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Is there a place where a credible, easily accessible list can be found online? Someone the Person (talk) 18:22, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

The fate of this article and World's largest municipalities by population

Please see Talk:World's largest municipalities by population#The way forward and help get this sorted out once and for all. Many thanks, Anna Frodesiak (talk) 10:47, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Karachi

I noticed, purely by accident, that the population figure (and ranking) given for Karachi did not match the cited source, and I corrected it while in the process of cleaning up the table a little. Shortly thereafter, an anonymous user edited the article, entering a different population figure (and one unsupported by the cited source), which changed the ranking back; they provided no summary for explanation. I have reverted that change, and request that any editors interested in this matter provide a citation to support claimed population figures. Endovior (talk) 00:31, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Lagos' figures are probably absurd too

I've never been to Lagos, but I have a hard time believing that a city that possess only 90 buildings according to a very reliable source and looks like this can be the fourth largest city on the planet. For comparison purposes, a city like NYC has got more than 700,000 buildings. And it seems that Lagos State is less populous than Lagos' city proper, what is very curious. I would like your help to fix this article as fast as possible. Thank you. MarcosPassos (talk) 07:31, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

A more accurate number probably needs to be found if that is ever possible. But, your first big mistake is equating "high-rises" with the word "building" and then forgetting that even if you didn't, a lot of these "buildings" are residences. Whatever the population of Lagos, your evidence for why it can't be as large as listed is tenuous, at best, and rather ridiculous. I'd really advise you kind of slow down for the time being. You seem something more than over-zealous. --Criticalthinker (talk) 09:30, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

"You seem something more than over-zealous." What are you insinuating, sir? Can you please say it clearly? And how come Lagos State is less populous than Lagos' city proper? Does that make any sense for you? Instead of making ridiculous assumptions about me, why don't you try to help in the discussion? And yes, my point about Lagos possessing only 90 buildings while being the "fourth largest city in the world" is valid. Also, the sources backing Lagos as the "fourth largest city in the world" are laughable. MarcosPassos (talk) 19:25, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Comparing apples to oranges

This article is just random, inaccurate and definitely not right. We are comparing the "municipality" of some cities to the "metropolitan areas" of others. Everyone who has already visited Sao Paulo and Istanbul knows that Sao Paulo is at least 5 or 6 times larger than Istanbul, and if you adopt the same measure being used to Istanbul (metropolitan area) and sum the municipality's population to the metropolitan area's population, Sao Paulo's population will skyrocket to almost 40 million people, making it the largest city in the planet. We should use the same definition for all cities, i.e.: Istanbul's city proper. MarcosPassos (talk) 18:27, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

• Apparently we are comparing apples to apples. Istanbul's city proper is in fact 14,160,467 according to the Turkish Statistical Institute. And Sao Paulo's city proper is 11,821,876 according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). I see nothing wrong with this whatsoever.

"Metropolitan Municipality-Province" is not "city proper". Yes, we are comparing the metropolitan area of Istanbul to São Paulo's municipality. MarcosPassos (talk) 06:46, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

I feel like a major issue here is that the definition of city proper is loose. For example, Tokyo has several definitions; its "specials wards", Tokyo prefecture, Kanto region, etc. While Kanto is definetly not city proper, it is arguable whether Tokyo wards or Tokyo prefecture is the "city proper". Another one I can think of is Rome versus Province of Rome. Truly, I think that city proper should refer to the smallest possible boundary. Ie Tokyo special wards and Rome. Staglit (talk) 23:43, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

The article is weird, it begins with a very clear definition "...defines population of a city proper as "the population living within the administrative boundaries of a city." But then, there is an unsourced paragraph at the end of the lead saying the exact opposite, defining an urban area and not a city proper. Since there is already a list for those, why can't we just consider this a list of cities at the administrative level? Mattximus (talk) 12:59, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

This article is indeed troublesome and gives people innacurate information. This issue regarding Istanbul and Sao Paulo came to my attention because I visited Istanbul waiting for an incredible vast city like Sao Paulo, New York or London because of this list's misinformation, but to my surprise the city was ridiculously small compared to these previously mentioned cities. There's no chance in hell that Istanbul is larger than Sao Paulo! Seriously, that's just impossible. I kept insisting to the people I had travelled with that Istanbul was the "5th largest city in the world" because of this stupid wiki article, and at some point I had to recognize that this article is just absurd and completely wrong. Istanbul just isn't that big. The information is wrong. We are comparing provinces with municipalities. It's like inserting the State of New York' population: 20 million people, and claim that NYC has 20 million people. And by looking the pictures of Sao paulo and Istanbul in this article the situation just gets more absurd and even funny, which city looks more populous to you: Istanbul or Sao Paulo?MarcosPassos (talk) 06:53, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Consider List of metropolitan areas by population for more "actual city" comparisons. This list compares the idea of "city proper" which is a very specific definition for a city. It means we compare the administrative area of cities. By this definition, Istanbul is in fact larger. And for an encyclopaedia, the statistics departments actual numbers is more trustworthy then your impression on the ground I'm afraid. I can explain your impression though. Sao Paulo has almost 9 million people outside of it's city limits in the suburbs, and Istanbul has only about 3. This makes Sao Paulo appear almost twice as large! But that's not what this page is counting. Mattximus (talk) 13:26, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

No, you are not understanding the issue here. We are comparing the PROVINCE of Istanbul with the MUNICIPALITY of Sao Paulo. In order to compare apples with apples we should compare the PROVINCE of Istanbul with the STATE of Sao Paulo, or the MUNICIPALITY of Sao Paulo with Istanbul's city. We are comparing the administrative area of one PROVINCE with the administrative area of one MUNICIPALITY. What we need is the population of Istanbul's city proper, or to put Sao Paulo's administrative area as the State, not the municipality. What we have now doesn't make any sense, and I'm not even talking about metropolitan areas, I'm talking about the cities. Istanbul just isn't the fifth largest city in the world by any stretch of the imagination. By adding other cities (like Çatalka or Beşiktaş) to Istanbul's population and pretend that is all "Istanbul" is the same as adding the city of Campinas' population to São Paulo and pretend that it's all "São Paulo". We are doing it wrong. BTW, that's Istanbul limits according to Google Maps: [1] It might help us somehow. MarcosPassos (talk) 00:16, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

What you don't seem to be understanding is that some countries have cities in which the province is also a local government. For Istanbul, for instance, the municipality and province are coterminous; they share the same borders. You might not like this definition or find any value in such a measurement, but this is what this page measures. It used to be that when these "local governments" were too large - as is often the case in China - that we only included the city districts (where applicable) into which the urban area extended and included that as a "city proper." I liked when we did that, however, someone messed the page up. Anyway, this page is not as consistent as it should be, but it's certainly not completely arbitrary. The problem is that there seems to be a lot of countries which don't have the concept of a "city proper." China seems to be a glaring example of this. --Criticalthinker (talk) 09:35, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

"What you don't seem to be understanding is that some countries have cities in which the province is also a local government. For Istanbul, for instance, the municipality and province are coterminous; they share the same borders." So, explain to me why the hell Çatalca has its own MAYOR and even a different GOVERNOR than Istanbul!!! If Çatalca were part of Istanbul and shared the same borders and local government, it should at least be ruled by the same MAYOR as Istanbul, right? Contrary to what you say, Çatalca is a city which the province is NOT the local government. MarcosPassos (talk) 19:46, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Delete

Is this article really necessary? It is riddled with inaccurate definitions. A Chinese "Direct-Control Municapal Area" is not the same as a pakistani city district government. We can't have an article comparing random definitions of urban regions. Maybe some stats need to be changed, but realistically, all countries treat the governance of cities differently, sometimes even they treat different cities differently! So either this should be deleted or it needs to be substantially revised to make this information accurate. Thoughts? Staglit (talk) 01:21, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I think we should just stop with our original and unpublished research because at this point we are doing anything other than shooting in the dark. And just insert here a list from a renowned source. There are many naive sites in the web now saying that Lagos is the fourth largest city in the world just because of this list, when this information is 100% bullcrap akin of that hilarious page about the "Bicholim Conflict". We are basically lying to the readers with our original research. So, I must agree with you, either we should delete this article or completely reformulate it. MarcosPassos (talk) 02:17, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Deleting is probably not the best solution, but it is an option. I believe a consensus needs to be established on what "City Proper" is. For example, the actual city of Tokyo is only around 8 million people, while the Tokyo prefecture is 14 million. Is the city proper of Tokyo the 23 special wards, as it is now, or the whole prefecture? The Japanese government defines the Tokyo Prefecture as a Metropolitain prefecture, but here it is only listed as the 23 special wards, which, for the record, DO NOT have an umbrella government. Each ward has a government, and the whole prefecture has one. ( Look here) As for Lagos, I agree it is hypocritical to talk about Lagos and then proceed to use the Lagos State as a defintion. Lagos State is not Lagos, just as you mentioned earlier, New York State is not New York city, etc. I think the best definition to use is the smallest common government of the whole area. So, all of Tokyo prefecture, just Lagos city, just the inner city of Paris, just the five boroughs of NYC, etc. But, before any huge changes are made we need input from more editors. Staglit (talk) 14:26, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I totally agree with you, but I'm afraid that there are not too many active editors reading the Talk Page of this article. MarcosPassos (talk) 19:52, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, if no one objects over the next few days, we can proceed with this plan. School is starting in Canada very soon so I won't have much time, but i'll try to squeeze in sometime. Staglit (talk) 23:53, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Delhi

I asked this years ago, but never got a definitive answer. But, shouldn't we be using Delhi Municipal Corporation as the "city proper" here instead of the entire National Capitol Territory? I thought that when we had an urban area covered by both an administrative district - in this case, the National Capitol Territory - and a municipal/local government - in this case the Municipal Corporation of Delhi - that we defined the "city proper" in terms of the local government? There are some cases where this is not possible because the urban area is only covered by a large(r) administrative division (province/state/region/etc.). But, in this particular case, we do have a city proper covered by a local government. So, someone please find the latest Census figure and land measurement for the Minicipal Corporation of Delhi and use that as the city proper. This is one city where this is rather straight-foward and unambiguous. --Criticalthinker (talk) 02:17, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

I just realize that Delhi was relatively recently split into three different municipal corporation. Anyway, the population and land-area would be just the same as the old Municipal Corporation of Delhi, which would be the National Capitol Territory minus the 27 tehsils, 59 census towns, 300 villages, and the municipal corporation of New Delhi and Delhi Cantonment. The land measurement would be the 1,397.3 km2 and the population (at the 2011 Census) of 11,007,835. --Criticalthinker (talk) 11:16, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

The 1397.3 sq.km covers an area excluding New Delhi MC and Delhi Cantonment, but including all census towns and villages. Total population just over 16 million. However, for statistical purposes (I guess), Census India defines an urban core, excluding the villages and census towns (and of course excluding New Delhi MC and Delhi Cantonment). Population about 11 million. The area is much less than the 1397 sq.km though, but I haven't found an updated figure for this yet. I think it was about 400-500 sq.km for the 1991 or 2001 Census, I don't remember exactly--Pjred (talk) 13:31, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

We'd kind of gone through this before, but I was under the impression the 11 million figure was for entire (former) municipal corporation. You mean to tell me that "city" in this case as defined by the Census is actually a territorial/settlement measurement and not a municipal/local government settlement? Anyway, the current figure on this page isn't correct, is it? The National Capitol Territory is not a local government or city proper. It has local governments and a city proper within it. --Criticalthinker (talk) 14:38, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes, the 11 million figure is not for the full territory under the administration of the Delhi Municipal Corporation (well, as you noticed above, it is nowadays (since 2012) divided into three separate municipal corporations), it is for an urban core defined for Census purposes. The 2014 Delhi Statistical Hand Book lists the area of the Delhi MC to 1,397.29 sq.km (page 3, table 1.2) and a 2011 Census population of 16,419,787 (same page and table).

As we nowadays don't have a single administrative area to count as the "city proper" of Delhi, we either list Delhi as a summing of the nowadays three municipal corporations (which is equivalent to the old municipal corporation) or we use the Census India definition of the urban core. My vote goes for the latter, but I guess other would prefer the first defintion.--Pjred (talk) 18:20, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

I realize you'd prefer the latter, but the building blocks for city propers with all but a few exceptions on this page are local governments. Going with the settlement/statistical definition of "Delhi" would be inconsistent with how we've decided to measure "city propers" when applicable. Still, push come to shove, since things have gotten so divided within Delhi as it concerns local governance, it might just be safer to list the National Capitol Territory as the "city proper" since the three municipal corporations that made up Delhi proper basically fill the entire boundaries of the territory, anyway. --Criticalthinker (talk) 05:12, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

I still think that Delhi should be removed as it is not a city proper. Zaketo (talk) 02:44, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Buenos Aires

Where is Buenos Aires? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:7:8500:982:3CAB:FC6B:4744:7111 (talk) 00:13, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Manila

Where is Manila?

from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila

Population (2010)[6]

• City	1,652,171
• Density	42,858/km2 (111,000/sq mi)
• Urban	22,710,000[5]
• Urban density	15,400/km2 (40,000/sq mi)
• Metro	11,855,975
• Metro density	18,567/km2 (48,090/sq mi)

I can expect that we would have some discrepancies way down the list, but Manila is easily in the top 5, which makes this page grossly inadequate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.117.115.184 (talk) 13:38, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

• This is a list of just the city proper by population, so Manila's 1.6 million is much below the cut-off of 3 million for this page. Mattximus (talk) 19:24, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Sydney

This has been debate before, but what exactly are the population and total area figures for Sydney measuring? The total area figure has got to be incorrect, as there is no way that that fits any kind of "city proper" measurement. If I continue to understand this correctly, "Sydney" as listed on here and on its page is a statistical metropolitan area composed of Local Government Areas designated by Australia's statistics agency as being the "Sydney Statistical Division" which is an entire metropolitan area . It is neither a "City District" as currently listed on the page nor certainly a "city proper" in any kind of traditional definition of the term. Australia simply doesn't have a statistical concept of "city proper" that would allow Sydney's listing, here. There is not even a metropolitan government for the inner local government areas of the urban and metropolitan area, nor a traditional city proper carved out of the urban and metropolitan area designated a "city." --Criticalthinker (talk) 11:35, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes I agree, Australia's closest classification is the Local Government Area, see City of Sydney. It has a population of 169,505, and thus does not belong on this list. The number quoted now of 4.7 million is the metropolitan area, which is another list entirely and does not match at all with the other city proper populations on this list. Mattximus (talk) 04:10, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

I do not agree with this. Half of "cities" in list is also metropolitan areas or provinces, not cities within administrative limits. Subtropical-man talk
(en-2) 09:46, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Can you name a few so we can verify? Mattximus (talk) 13:01, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

• Chinesse: Chongqing is not city with a population of 28,846,170 within administrative city limits, Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin in China also.
• Kinshasa in DR Congo is Province
• Cairo, Alexandria and Giza with this population is not administrative city limits.
• also Luanda in Angola, Dhaka in Bangladesh....

Sydney is no different from the half of the cities on the list. Since 2011, Australia has introduced a new division [1]. Officially, Sydney is Greater Capital City Statistical Area with a population of 4,757,083. Subtropical-man talk
(en-2) 14:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

• You are not correct about Chongqing or Sydney. Chongqing it actually is a single administrative unit, which happens to extend way beyond the urban core. That's why we have List of urban areas by population. Sydney has no local government encompassing the statistical area. There is no grand mayor of Sydney, no unified government. That's why we have List of metropolitan areas by population. So both of those examples do not apply to this particular list. I will have to check the other 3 examples you gave later. Mattximus (talk) 16:07, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
• It appears you are correct that the Giza population is inflated. The best source I found for Giza city proper is the 2006 census count of 3,087,878, which would still put it on this list. Do you have a better source? Mattximus (talk) 16:13, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Ankara and how Wikipedia editors make up things as they go along

These statistics are complete crap how can Ankara have a population of 5.10 million contained in 1,910 km2 when the whole population of Ankara province in 2012 was 4.965 million is contained in 25,706 km2 as shown here by the Turkish government http://www.turkstat.gov.tr/PreHaberBultenleri.do?id=15844 the whole province is not expected to hit 5.90 million until 2023 and Beijing again complete and utter twaddle the city is not the size of the state of Kuwait the complete shite and misinformation people put on Wikipedia is breathtaking in its arrogance oh wait a minute you forgot add in the super conglomeration of Londonbirmanchesterleedspool population 23 million contained in 48,569 km2 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 175.157.107.70 (talk) 15:59, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Apparently, in turkey, the "Metropolitan Municipalities" are actually province equivalents, so Ankara Metropolitan Municipality and Ankara Province are conterminous, a sort of consolidated province-city/municipality government from what I understand. I think we could effectively argue that this isn't a "city proper" by most definitions of the term, but then we'd have to debate which of the districts within the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality are the city proper, and I have no idea. This would also mean we'd have to do the same for Istanbul, which is another metropolitan municipality equal to a province. I'd be interested in fixing this, as I'd argued against Istabul's entire province being included. You are right, some of these go beyond even the idea of a regional/metropolitan municipality - which we can argue is not really usually a city proper, either - to a full-blown province-level definition which is simply ridiculous. --Criticalthinker (talk) 19:23, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Almost forgot to add that though metropolitan municipalities are special provinces, they are still divided into local government districts (ilçeler). The problem is that there doesn't even seem to be a statistical definition - let alone a collection of these into a second-tier local government - of which of the 25 districts of the metropolitan municipality consistute a "city proper." Turkey may be another case like Australia where there simply isn't a concept of "city proper" with an associated local government. And, if that's the case, perhaps Turkish cities don't belong on the list, either. The Australia, the "metropolitan" definition is too large to use, and the "district" definitions are too small to make the list. --Criticalthinker (talk) 19:32, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

You are correct that some Turkish cities are consolidated with the province, in which case it would fit our definition of "city proper", for example it has a mayor. So they should be on this list. Like some Chinese cities, they encompass rural areas and small villages, but this is still technically "city proper". Australia is different, in that there is no mayor for Syndey, so Australian cities can't be placed on this list. I think what the individual above was looking for was List of urban areas by population, which estimates about how many people are in the built up area, not this list which has different criteria. Mattximus (talk) 01:57, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

I Think the first editor (if not for using colorful language) has a point as shown in this article by Ruth Alexander for the BBC in 2012 looks at this issue http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16761784 entitled The world's biggest cities: How do you measure them? The journalist interviewing Professor Kam Wing Chan of the University of Washington in the United States. The extract is included here: "Which is the biggest city in the world? And why is such a simple question so difficult to answer? If you search on the internet for the world's biggest city, you'll find various different candidates: Tokyo, Seoul, Chongqing, Shanghai... Which one you regard as the holder of the title, all depends on what you mean by "city". Most experts will tell you that Tokyo is the world's largest metropolis, with a population of about 36 million people. But the core of the city has only eight million people living in it. The reason it gets into the record books is that the surrounding region - which includes the country's second city Yokohama, as well as 86 other towns and cities - has become so built up that it is now one huge continuous urbanised area. Yokohama alone has a population of 3.6 million. Defining the borders of a city is no easy task - and there is no international standard to ensure consistency. Three scholars who in 2009 compared eight different lists of top cities by population, found there were 30 "top 20 cities" in total. One of them, Richard Greene, associate professor of geography at Northern Illinois University in the United States, says even the most authoritative list, from the UN, "compares apples with pears". "We tend to think of three concepts of the city," he says. "One being a municipal definition - the legal city if you will. A second we call the urbanised area, or the physical city - the built-up portion. A third we call the metropolitan area, which some people refer to as the influence of the city - how far out does the city go in terms of its influence, such as commuting patterns." Austria-sized city? Most experts rate Tokyo as the world's biggest city because of the size of the population in the larger urbanised area. It will probably still be the biggest in 2025, although its population is expected to scarcely increase. The UN expects it to be followed by the two major megacities in India - Delhi and Mumbai, which are projected respectively to have 29 million and 26 million inhabitants respectively by then. And what about the cities in the country everyone is talking about - China? Its cities are growing so fast that for the first time more than half the population live in urban areas, it was announced earlier this month. But China's population statistics can be particularly misleading. "Virtually overnight, Chongqing has become the largest city not only in China, but in the world," Time Magazine proclaimed in 2005. But it wasn't true - Chongqing is not the largest city in the world, or even in China. Why do so many people think it is? Professor Kam Wing Chan of the University of Washington in the United States, who has made a career out of correcting people's exaggerated claims about Chinese population statistics, explains that what China calls a municipality or city is better understood as a province. Many of the 30 million people who are said to live in the city of Chongqing are actually agricultural workers living in a rural setting, he says. In fact, he says, the area is so huge it's about the size of Austria. 'Doom and gloom' "And if you were to travel from the downtown area to some of the peripheral areas where those 30 million live, it might take a day or two because the road conditions are not that good. So, this cannot be possibly called a city. Because when we call a place a city the general understanding is that we're talking about a commuting zone." Professor Chan calculates that a more reasonable estimate of the urban population of Chongqing is six or seven million. The largest city in China is actually Shanghai. It is commonly thought to have a population of 20 million, but Professor Chan thinks 16 million is a better estimate. He says everyone just loves to think China's cities are bigger than they actually are. He has even had to correct fellow experts at a world conference on global megacities of the future. "They were trying to paint a really doom and gloom picture of these unmanageable urban giants, megacities with a population range of 20 to 30 million people. "They were saying China will easily have a few of those in that range, which is not true - they are just picking up on a wrong definition. That gloom and doom scenario will definitely need to be revised." Richard Greene is co-author, with Richard L Forstall and James B Pick, of Which are the largest? Why lists of major urban areas vary so greatly, published in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 2009" Clearly definition is the point here and the list here fits the point's (if not others) made by these experts talking about statistical exaggeration.--Navops47 (talk) 02:45, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes, this is reasonable, that's why we have 3 (!) lists for largest cities, using 3 different definitions (city proper, urban area, and metropolitan area). The urban area is the closest approximation to the common definition of city, but has a serious flaws that the city proper definition does not have. Urban areas are arbitrary to some extent (what is urban?), and thus population estimates are, well, estimates. Using the city proper definition, we know exact borders, under a specific local government, and can use accurate census data to tell a more exact population. But thankfully wikipedia is not made of paper and we can have all three lists. Mattximus (talk) 02:56, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm worry, but while "city proper" is probably my favorite definition of a city, it is definitely no less ambiguous than the other terms. And, I disagree with you above that simply having a mayor/governor/whatever, makes a city proper what it is. It's as much a spatial definition as a political one. Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, for instance, is clearly not a "city proper." You've got central urbanized districts which have no real connections to some of the far flung rural districts of this "city." In this case, when you have these "municipalities" which include not just urbanized districts within it, but completely seperate rural districts sometimes hundreds of square miles in size, these clearly aren't part of the "city proper." The Chinese "cities" are a particularly egregious case of this. Not only does the "Municipality" of Beijing include its city proper, it includes its metropolitan area and then rural land with cities of its own miles and miles seperated from "Beijing." This has got to be fixed. In Beijing's case, it's rather easy to see that the inner-city and first-ring districts are the "city proper." --Criticalthinker (talk) 03:02, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

City proper is a politically determined spatial area. It's defined by the reach of the local government, whatever form it may take but usually municipality level. I've never heard of your definition before, but I think you are thinking of urban area, another list we have. Mattximus (talk) 03:11, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Obviously, you have not been following the history of this page. It's more than that. There are cities on here which include only parts of their province despite their being no unified local government (etc. Lagos) and other clearer definitions when a clearly defined city has a local government (etc. NYC). If it was just about claim, than Chonquing would be on this list, and it isn't for good reason. This isn't a list of local government areas/districts, there is another list for that. This includes a multitude of different spatial and political arrangements. --Criticalthinker (talk) 03:26, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

I think you are mistaken, the "city proper" is defined by the United Nations as the "single political jurisdiction which contains the historical city centre". The term "city proper" is used specifically for a political administrative unit. Almost every city on this list meets that definition. What exactly are you using to define this term, since you are not using the United Nation's official definition? Mattximus (talk) 13:16, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

But you are right, Lagos should not be on this list since it is structured exactly like Syndey, which is also not on this list since it doesn't have a large population using the definition of city proper. I removed the city for consistency. Mattximus (talk) 13:31, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Please re-read Professor Kwans definitions and how he says they are not really a City they are a province this is the same case as the first contributor colorfully highlighted defining Ankara at 25,706 km2 as a city proper is ridiculous if we are using that argument therefore Chonquing should therefore be top this list with 30 million ahead of Shanghai.--Navops47 (talk) 03:46, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

That is not ridiculous, because that is the internationally recognized definition of city proper. Here is the United nations accepted definitions:

*The United Nations defines an urban agglomeration as the built-up or densely populated area containing thecity proper, suburbs and continuously settled commuter areas. It may be smaller or larger than a metropolitanarea; it may also comprise the city proper and its suburban fringe or thickly settled adjoining territory.

*A metropolitan area is the set of formal local government areas that normally comprise the urban area asa whole and its primary commuter areas.

*A city proper is the single political jurisdiction that contains the historical city centre.

Note that wikipedia has a list for each of these three definitions. I suggest we stick with those three, as it's the most reputable source for concrete definitions of what makes a city. Mattximus (talk) 13:21, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Again, you are sorely confused. No, this page has never used one definition of "city proper" and certainly not what you call an "official" definition. You are overstepping your bounds in this discussion, quite frankly. For this page, there is no such thing as an "official" city proper definition; you're just going to have to accept that. --Criticalthinker (talk) 15:09, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

United nations does have a definition, and it's cited in this very article, why shouldn't we use that specific definition? It's as official as any definition could possibly be...! Mattximus (talk) 16:26, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

• I think the major reason for this confusion is because everyone is trying to apply the definition of where he resides to other parts of the world. In Nigeria for instance, cities never have separate administrative Government, cities in a particular state are responsibilities of the respective State Government and the Local Governments of the different LGAs present in the cities. It doesn't mean the cities don't have defined boundaries. A "city proper" in Nigeria are the areas within the defined geographical boundary, while areas outside this boundary maybe a continuous urban area. I think the person who removed Lagos is mistaking Lagos State with Lagos. Even though the entirety of Lagos State (which is Nigeria's smallest state in terms of Area) has been considered one big metropolitan area, Lagos city has its clearly defined boundary. here is a map of Lagos State and here is a map of Lagos City inside Lagos state. I'm adding Lagos back to the list.

Mattximus Please do not remove the paragraph and the citation I added about Professor Kwan it is providing a counter argument for the definition he is also a highly noted academic, this from his faculty page page " His research focuses on the impact of social and political institutions on migration, urbanization and the urban labor market in China. He specializes in China's cities, migration, employment, the household registration system, and related statistics. In recent years, he has served as a consultant for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, United Nations, and McKinsey & Co. on a number of policy projects related to China's cities and economy. His recent commentaries and interviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, BBC, China Radio International, CBC Radio, PBS, Caixin and other media in Asia" he is NOT A RANDOM SOURCE you will see from his published works here: http://faculty.washington.edu/kwchan/ChanCV.htm. Again I refer to his points earlier you will also notice the data and tables were not changed by the inclusion of the paragraph so do not remove it again it is important.--Navops47 (talk) 02:42, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I removed it not because I disagree with the professor, it's just that you haven't presented any alternative definition which is usable for China. If you want to present an alternative view, then please lets discuss. Until then, the way I see it, is that we acknowledge the definition by the UN is imperfect in many countries, and doesn't capture the common view of city proper that most people have. For example, Chongqing should be lower on the list, and Syndey and Melbourne should be on the list. Cities are different depending on the country so no list will be perfect, but that's why we have 3 lists. The city proper as defined by the UN is the lowest tier administrative unit. So that's what this list is about, imperfections and all. There is an urban area list which better matches the common view of a city. Mattximus (talk) 03:22, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

For now I suggest we adhere to WP:Consensus until the matter is sorted with no further reverting of cited edits and allow time for other editor's input's if there is no clear consensus move the process to WP:RFC.--Navops47 (talk) 03:42, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Agreed, I have not reverted you. To begin, I would like to suggest we use the United Nations definition of city proper, which states that the spatial boundaries are coincident with the lowest tier administrative unit and encompasses the historic city centre, with an understanding that it won't capture every nation's cities due to differing administrative units (both inflating and deflating numbers: China and Australia respectively), but that there are lists with alternative definitions which may better meet those needs. "City Proper" as defined as an administrative unit, is quite accepted internationally and in the field of urban geography, not just by the united nations. Mattximus (talk) 12:59, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

You keep saying this, but it was you who added Chongqing - a city largely decided years ago wouldn't be on this list in its full municipal boundaries - to the list. --Criticalthinker (talk) 20:28, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Keep saying what? Chongqing should be on this list since it matches the UN definition in the lead. It should not be in the List of urban areas by population at that population because it's not all urban. Mattximus (talk) 20:41, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I thought we agreed not to edit this article further and I assumed not include contentious data until we had further input as that has now been ignored I have moved the process to WP:RFC which will now flag up to other adminstrators and editor's outside of this talk page to intervene please refrain from editing in the mean time see below--Navops47 (talk) 02:27, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

CommentI have added a dispute tag to the article until the RFC process is resolved please ensure you leave this in place thank you.--Navops47 (talk) 02:45, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

United Kingdom Statutory City Regions

Just a few question's do UK designated City region's qualify for this list for example Greater Manchester Statutory City Region which has a population of 3,363,555 according to the Office for National Statistics UK which is under the strategic governance of Greater Manchester Combined Authority?--Navops47 (talk) 04:50, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Also take a look at Leeds City Region governed by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority population 3,000,000?--Navops47 (talk) 05:13, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

These would seem to be more metropolitan/regional definitions than city proper definitions. Their functions aren't developed enough, yet, to where you could seriously call them "city propers." London would seem to be the only special case for the UK. --Criticalthinker (talk) 06:10, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

That's interesting I thought they are really metro areas however if you argue that case here: List of metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom for there inclusion there rejected.--Navops47 (talk) 04:25, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Also there is to be a directly elected Mayor of Greater Manchester by 2017 which includes the city region as shown in the UK government white paper here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/devolution-to-the-greater-manchester-combined-authority-and-transition-to-a-directly-elected-mayor and will have the same powers as the Mayor of London how do we then view the city region after the election?--Navops47 (talk) 05:15, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

I would guess it would depend on how much area they'd include. If it was mostly just the urbanized area, perhaps a case could be made, but I still think it'd be a longshot as it still appears the district-level of government will retain most of the power for quite some time before they are able to work things out. And, London would still be different from these City Regions since London is still also an administrative region. These new "City Regions" would appear at first blush to still be below the administrative level of Regions of England. This is all interesting to discuss, but I think we should perhaps get back to discussing easier matters, like paring down the sizes of Chinese "cities". --Criticalthinker (talk) 08:10, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Calculation of population density

Apologies this is probably a very stupid question, but could somebody please explain how the population density is calculated?

For example according to the article the population of Faisalabad is 7,457,589, its area is 1,435.07km2 so I would expect its density to be 5,196.67. Could somebody please explain why it is instead 3,145?

Many thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.157.162.153 (talk) 08:39, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately, a lot of numbers in the table are simply wrong. Feel free to correct the errors when you spot them. -Zanhe (talk) 17:09, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Someone came in a few days ago and messed up the numbers, Faisalabad I think uses Chongking's area... Mattximus (talk) 21:45, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Scratch that, someone just fixed it. But this list needs serious quality control. Mattximus (talk) 21:47, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

London

Who changed the London numbers in the past few days? I say we do what we've been doing for London and much of the other cities with national statistics agencies who update estimates annually, and wait to change it upon the release of the Office of National Statistics (ONS) data, which will be the mid-2014 data. Please switch it back and the citation until that estimate is released. Thanks. There is no need to change the data when we have a consistent annual measurement. --Criticalthinker (talk) 11:52, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Luanda

Luanda on this list caught my eye. Luanda is not one of those confusing cases in which there is no easily identifiable city proper (i.e. a central city with an associated local government). Luanda Province is not the city proper in this case; it is the 44 square mile Luanda Municipality within Luanda Province. In this case, Luanda Province would more correspond to the idea of a metropolitan area. Given that Luanda Municiaplity is not nearly populous enough, Luanda doesn't belong on this list of city propers. --Criticalthinker (talk) 13:10, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable, I agree, but we should add it to List of metropolitan areas by population as well for consistency. Mattximus (talk) 20:17, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

Someone can do that if they'd like to. I'm only concerned with Luanda Province not being a city proper in any sense of the word. --Criticalthinker (talk) 01:23, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Changed it for you. Mattximus (talk) 17:20, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, though the reason you gave was a bit off. Even were the province to have a population over the 3 million threshold, what we've discussed is that the province isn't a city proper. --Criticalthinker (talk) 09:37, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

The municipality of Luanda within the Luanda province has somewhere between 2.5-2.9 million people, which is what I quoted in the reason. Mattximus (talk) 21:48, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

What about cases like Brussels, Luxembourg, Sydney, Vancouver, Melbourne, Manila, London? 58.153.97.134 (talk) 21:07, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

Most of those are not on this list and should not be on the list. Even if you count the whole Greater Vancouver Area you wouldn't get to the minimum. Same with Luxembourg. Not sure why you mentioned that one. City of London is not an administrative division, it's a ceremonial county, so it doesn't count. Mattximus (talk) 21:25, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

Lima

Do we need to take another look at Lima? Here is what List of districts of Lima page says about the city proper:

"The province of Lima is divided into forty three districts of Lima (Spanish: distritos) which are administered by the Metropolitan Municipality of Lima. The city proper (urban area) of Lima is generally considered to be formed by thirty of these districts. The remaining thirteen districts consist of mostly rural and sparsely populated desert and mountainous areas."

This may very well be a city we keep as it's currently listed, as the mayor of the central municipality is also the mayor of the whole province. But, this is definitely worthy of discussion seeing as how locally the entire province doesn't seem to be considered as a city proper, particularly given the urban area/conurbation doesn't seem extend into every district. Even what the locals consider the "city proper" could easily be argued to be a metropolitan area. This seems to be another example (along with the obvious Chinese city definition of "city proper") of a metropolitan area passed off as a legitimate city proper. --Criticalthinker (talk) 12:15, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I browsed through the official statistics website for Peru and they without fail refer to Lima as a City with a population similar to that listed here. They use the this number to compare to other cities in Peru, which are not congruent with provinces. They mention that Lima has a single mayor, and do not provide any statistics for sub-Lima parts. It appears based on the official website that the City Proper is about 8 751 700. Mattximus (talk) 12:56, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I'll be bringing more of these to your attention in the future. Just my opinion, but if there are districts within a "city" in which no part of the conurbation extends from the central urban area, then they can't really be included in a "city proper" definition, if even they are under the jurisdiction of some upper-tier metropolitan/regional local government. This would go for Chinese cities in particular, and if their are such districts in this particular case, for Lima, too, then. --Criticalthinker (talk) 14:02, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. You say "can't really be included in a "city proper" definition". Are you referring to the UN definition? If so then yes, that's the definition of "City Proper", an administrative boundary. If you have another definition of "city proper" please let me know, maybe it's better than the UN one. But until then we must use the definition we have. Mattximus (talk) 15:20, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

You keep on with this UN definition schtick, as if that is the end all/be all of a definition. Again, by the "UN definition" Chongqing would be added by its municiaplity definition and you'd include every thing in Tokyo-to. This list is rife with us using sensible use of our discreation when "cities" clearly as districts which are clearly not part of these city's city proper. --Criticalthinker (talk) 12:26, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

That's not how wikipedia works. We do not do original research, we can't add or remove contents of a list depending on what feels right. We are bound by a definition that makes clear the contents of the list. It doesn't matter if we like it or not, that's how this works. If you don't like the current criterion for inclusion, please by all means find a different one and we can work with that. Mattximus (talk) 12:40, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

But, you ARE doing original work. Again, if you're not going to include Chongqing in its full "municipality" form, but include the ridiculous boundaries for every other Chinese city, you are doing original work. I'm not sure if you're slow or what. --Criticalthinker (talk) 15:27, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Someone added Chongqing for us. I guess you are right, and we should be consistent and include the Chinese cities. Mattximus (talk) 00:54, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

You are hilarious. Instead of recognizing how silly you are and realize that "city proper" is a work where you have to do a bit of original work, you go and add the entire Chongqing Municipality which you know is not a city proper but by the absolute and literal wildest definition of "city proper." I'm done with you. This is really fairly easy. When a urbanized area/conurbation spread spread into districts where there is no definition for a "city proper" (i.e. EVERY Chinese city) then we could do the original work of only including the districts into which the settlement spills. Completely rural districts and "cities" in which you've got multiple settlements seperated by miles of rural space are not "city propers." Most of these Chinese "cities" have multiple city propers within them. This is not rocket science. Hopefully, someone else more intelligent than you will find this page interesting and wrest control of it away from your overly literal and/or overly broad definitions. I'm done responding to you with this. --Criticalthinker (talk) 10:48, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

I didn't add the city, an IP user did. I fixed the population numbers. Frankly, I'm done with you. Your personal attacks are rather immature and embarrassing for the both of us. Mattximus (talk) 11:11, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

But User:Criticalthinker, you do realize Wikipedia is not a place for OR right? Your concerns are absolutely well-founded but the fact is that there is no universally consistent or agreed-upon way of defining a "city proper" – this of course is why the concepts of urban agglomeration and metropolitan area were invented. OTOH if we're reduced to the task of trying to maintain a list based on User:Mattximus's preferred definition (is someone actually going to add the 145 Chinese prefecture-level cities with populations over 3 million we're currently missing?), then this list is a blatant original synthesis of information since even the source of that definition has specifically warned against comparing figures originating from different countries, which is exactly what this list does. Cobblet (talk) 14:44, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment, you see the problem clearly. The original source said something like "city proper" is only a valid definitinon for 83 countries, and came up with the other two definitions as you stated. So what are we to do? In order to avoid original research we either add the ~53 Chinese cities not currently on this list (I'm not sure where you got the 145, not all are over 3 million, and some already on this list) or delete the list entirely. I lean towards the first option, because (at least for those 83 countries), "city proper" is the best definition because it is the only definition of the 3 presented that does not have arbitrary borders (inasmuch as administrative borders are not arbitrary) which means much more reliable population estimates. What User:Criticalthinker wants is original research where we pick and choose which cities go on this list as he sees fit, and I'm not comfortable doing that. What do you think should be done? Mattximus (talk) 23:12, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

It's not a "valid" concept in the sense you're thinking of. The UN never says that a city proper from one country is comparable to a city proper from another, as we're trying to do here. In fact they quite clearly warn against the practice. ("Given the variety of situations in the world, it is not currently possible (or indeed even desirable) to adopt uniform criteria to distinguish urban areas from rural areas." "No attempts have been made to impose consistency in definitions across countries. However, several efforts are underway at different institutions to produce globally comparable estimates of the urban population with uniform criteria to define urban areas based on satellite imagery of land cover or nighttime lights. Nonetheless, to date, these approaches have not generated the long historical time series of urbanization estimates required for this report.")

That last sentence points to the real reason UN collects this data: they want to measure the population growth of a city over time. That way they can project future population growth in urban areas – the real objective of their report. They aren't interested in finding the "largest city in the world" and repeatedly warn against using their data to do so.

To me the exercise of determining the largest "city proper" in the world reminds me of the attempt to determine the "highest-valued currency unit". It is a futile task with no meaningful answer. My preference would be to redirect this article to world's largest cities where there should be a discussion of why the concept of a city proper is not useful for comparing the size of two different cities and why alternative measures have been developed.

As to where I got 145 from: List of prefectures in the People's Republic of China lists 166 prefecture-level cities with a census population in 2010 of over 3 million, 21 of which we already list here. Therefore 145 need to be added. That's not taking into consideration the fact a couple more cities have passed the 3-million mark in the latest 2014 estimates. Cobblet (talk) 00:01, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

You're essentially arguing - and others have in the past - that this page is useless. And, while I guess that's certainly an argument, I'm not sure if it's one I'm interested in debating. Sure, "city proper" can be an ambiguous term, but it's certainly far from the most ambiguous subject we have pages for here on Wikipedia. If this is something you want to discuss, perhaps you should do what others have done and nominate this for deletion. I won't be following you down that path, but you're more than free to do that. I think there is a rather easy and as fair-as-can-be way, here, to add define a city proper, and I've already shared those ideas (as have others) and don't find any of them particularly unreasonable. I am not interested in arguing whether this needs to be a page at all; that's been fairly firmly decided over time. This research has held up for years, now. --Criticalthinker (talk) 08:19, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

I see now that you had already made basically the same arguments six years ago. Unfortunately right now there are not enough informed participants taking part in this discussion to drive any sort of consensus-building. I would be interested in hearing what your "easy and as fair-as-can-be" definition of a city proper is, because I haven't seen one presented here other than Mattximus's. I've been looking into this issue specifically in the case of Chinese cities and because of the rapid urbanization in recent years it's hard to say what the "city proper" is in many cases now. I don't know what you're trying to say by "this research has held up for years" – as far as I can tell the list is awful (it's now missing Delhi and Chongqing) precisely because we seem to have no clear idea of what a "city proper" is. Cobblet (talk) 09:51, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

It's rather quite simple for a Chinese city. It's far from perfect, but it's consistent. When an urban area of a principle settlement does not extend into a district within the huge boundaries of these "cities" it should simply not be included. The same could be applied consistently to other "cities" on this list in which you have obviously "empty" or rural districts in which the actual settlement does not extend into. If "city proper" is to be equivalent to "municipal" boundaries in every case, then there is absolutely no need for this to be an article about actual city propers. Name it "List of largest administrative local boundaries" if that's the case, and even in that case, it's hard to call most any government in these Chinese municipalities "local government" in any regular sense of the word. There is nothing local about a government that covers areas in which you sometimes even have multiple and actual unconnected cities/settlements. --Criticalthinker (talk) 07:06, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

What criteria do you use to distinguish between urban and rural areas when they haven't been designated in some official manner? For example, would you mind telling me what you consider the city proper of Shanghai, Nanjing or Foshan to be? Cobblet (talk) 07:20, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

I mean, I guess that's for a group to come to a consensus on, but for me, if I'm being liberal, again, it'd be any district into which the urban area of the primary settlement spills/extends. It'd be kind of hard to do it any other way. Haven't looked at any of the others, but I wouldn't put up too much of a fight including all Shanghai districts as city proper, though, I'd probably cut off the island county, as it's not a directly adjacent urban area. Though, instead of talking about the tougher cases - in which case this page is exactly where we'd argue/discuss such things - why not speak of the obvious current ridiculous definitions like Beijing? You've got places/settlements like Yanqing and Tanghekou, which are not only not in districts in which the Beijing urban area does not extend, but some would even argue might not even be in Beijing's metropolitan area despite being under the jurisdiction of the municipality. Chongqing is an even worse example of this, a "city" in which you have large cities/settlements outside the metropolitan area of Chongqing included in the municipality. I'm still a bit confused as to why it's not on the page, though, because it's city proper is well over the threshold. Anyway, even apart from my idea, looking at these cities pages, it seems that there is almost always statistical definition of city within these "cities" usually labeled "city/city proper" and "suburbs" in larger cities, which would be the city proper. In the case of still large but relatively smaller cities is usually even easier than that. I assume this isn't guess work and this is from some statistics agency or at least widely understood instutional definition within China of what a "city proper" is. --Criticalthinker (talk) 08:07, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

If your method boils down to deciding every particular case by consensus, it's definitely not going to be "easy"; moreover, it's going to be OR in many cases. I picked Shanghai, Nanjing and Foshan deliberately because there is no currently used official designation of "urban districts" in these cities that I'm aware of. The old definition of Shanghai's urban core, for example, excludes the entirety of Pudong, which still has a lot of suburban areas but also happens to include Lujiazui which is now Shanghai's main financial district. I'm jumping immediately to the tougher cases because if you find some methodology (ignoring whether it's OR or not) that works for some easy cases but fails for the hard ones, you're back to square one. Isn't consistency the whole point of having this debate in the first place? Is it fair that we exclude Zengcheng District and Conghua District from Guangzhou's city proper because they aren't included among the officially designated "urban districts" of Guangzhou, while Nanjing gets to keep all its districts because its government doesn't bother to make similar distinctions? Is deciding answers to questions like these really what Wikipedia's about?

When you start talking about "actual city propers" I think you have in mind a concept closer to that of a city center or an inner city than a city proper. I agree with you that comparing Chongqing and Beijing's city proper to any city proper outside China is ridiculous; I myself have pointed out the silliness of adding 145 more Chinese political units to the list because they'd satisfy this notion of a city proper; but unless we rename this page to something else, I think we're stuck. If you do rename it, you'd better have a well-defined and commonly-used concept in mind to replace the city proper concept, because trying to determine each and every case by consensus is equivalent to inventing our very own brand-new concept right here on Wikipedia. Cobblet (talk) 09:36, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

The part about describing what I'd do as defining something closer to city centers or even inner-cities is just patently incorrect, particularly when I'm talking about adding up districts into which an urban area extends. My definitions would amount to something even greater than a conurbantion, in most cases, and would infact be equivalent to how a lot of nations define metropolitan area. My other definitions (city proper and inner-ring sububurbs), BTW, is not even something I even came up with, but is rather something that's already defined on most big-city Chinese articles on Wiki. Again, you asked for my opinion and I gave it, but don't mischaracterize what I said. --Criticalthinker (talk) 11:12, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

My apologies – thanks for clarifying. I am well aware of the definitions you're talking about but have not been able to find sources for most of them. Cobblet (talk) 11:29, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for this last response, you have articulated very succinctly what I've been trying to say for quite a while now. I'll help move forward with whatever is decided. On another note, any opposition for using [[2]] for the population of Delhi? Mattximus (talk) 12:43, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Are you comfortable with giving the population figure of a municipal corporation that no longer exists? DMC was split into three in 2012. It appears the core of the city consists of the districts of New Delhi and Central Delhi and it appears from the few available maps I could find of the current municipal corporations that Central Delhi is split between North and South Delhi Municipal Corporations (New Delhi has its own), which would suggest that none of these municipal corporations can be called city propers since they don't encompass the city centre on their own. So I would suggest giving the figure of the National Capital Territory which has a population of 16 million, even though 2.5% of that is rural. (For comparison, Shanghai's population is 10% rural.) Cobblet (talk) 04:25, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Chongqing redux

I've added 2014 estimates of the population of Central Chongqing, with accompanying explanatory notes and sources. Let me know if you have issues with it. Cobblet (talk) 06:25, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Population densities

The population density figures are wrong in many cases – I only checked the first 15 entries and already found Tianjin, Istanbul and Lahore as examples. Is there a better way of doing this rather than just trusting people to do the calculations on their own? I'm thinking of converting all the density cells to use Template:Pop density. My hope is that it might encourage people to also update the density stat when they update the raw population figure, and even if they don't the discrepancy will be obvious even to anyone who's not monitoring recent changes and is just looking at the code. I've changed the entry for Shanghai to illustrate what I mean. Cobblet (talk) 22:58, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes, how is this even possible? Isn't density simply the population divided by the area? Dalgard (talk) 01:22, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

It is but people are manually entering in the densities and when the populations get updated people don't remember to change the density as well. Before I go ahead with the change, one more question: is the nts template still necessary? The columns don't contain text anymore. Cobblet (talk) 06:07, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 2 June 2015

Delhi belongs on this list at rank 12. See citation [24], which is used to verify all the other Indian cities totals as well.

Edit: Sorry, put this request in without reading the rest of the talk page. 132.239.194.203 (talk) 19:25, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

As above, DMC was split into three in 2012. Mattximus (talk) 22:59, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

New format?

I was thinking about this list and I'm wondering opinions on the idea of merging List of cities proper by population, List of urban areas by population, and List of metropolitan areas by population into List of world's largest cities. The advantage is now we can compare all cities, using whatever metric is more appropriate. Consider this test case (I'm not sure Chongqing's numbers are correct, but this is just for the idea). Sydney now appears on the list, and we have more accurate idea of the size of Chongqing's.

Name	Country	Image	City Proper	Urban	Metropolitan
Toronto	Canada		2,615,060	5,132,794	5,583,064
Chongqing	China		29,914,000	17,830,100	17,000,000
Sydney	Australia		169,505	3,641,421	4,840,600

Just an idea, what do you think? Mattximus (talk) 23:16, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Two concerns: 1. Demographia's "urban area" is a concept its creator seems to have invented de novo – it's a mixture of the urban agglomeration and metropolitan area concepts. Frankly I think it should be considered OR. 2. Many of the "metropolitan areas" are not metropolitan areas – they are political units. Metropolitan areas are defined by commuting statistics and most countries don't collect that data. As difficult as it is to satisfactorily define a city proper, I think the other two lists are even worse in terms of encyclopedic quality, and to glorify them on a "list of largest cities" would not be a good idea. Cobblet (talk) 00:08, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Beijing & Others

I don't know how we're going to do this, or who will take on this task, but a "city" of 16,410.54 km2 is not a city proper by any acceptable definition. This is getting so ridiculous as to be offensive. These aren't even cities, let alone city propers. Fix it. --Criticalthinker (talk) 03:50, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

That area of Beijing you quote is actually the "city proper" by the definition provided by the United Nations. It is correct. What you are confusing is "city proper" with "urban area". You will find at List of urban areas by population Beijing has a much more realistic area of 3,820 km2 which probably corresponds to what you are thinking. This list is for city proper, that list is for urban area. It does not make sense to add urban area to this list because that is not what this list is about. Mattximus (talk) 20:19, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

We have been over this a million times. Municipalities (and most prefecture-level cities) are in no way what we've considered "city propers." It's exactly why Chongqing was taken off here. I'm not going to keep going throught this with you. --Criticalthinker (talk) 21:06, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Well the reference in the lead of this article is exactly what I said. Do you have a reference that says "city proper" is not defined by administrative borders? If not we have to accept that definition. And to be honest, it will be hard to top the official United Nations definition that I cited, but I'm open to your alternative. Mattximus (talk) 22:31, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

The citation referenced for the population is very wrong I used google translate to translate the webpage source here http://www.bjstats.gov.cn/xwgb/tjgb/ndgb/201302/t20130207_243837.htm%7C into to this link http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&prev=search&sl=zh-CN&u=http://www.bjstats.gov.cn/xwgb/tjgb/ndgb/201302/t20130207_243837.htm&sandbox=0&usg=ALkJrhjIGXjy3n6wcg-BF9f0t8-FIxnu6w. The translated section on the population stats states this "Population: the end of the city's resident population of 2069.3 million, an increase of 50.7 million over the previous year. Among them, the resident foreign population of 773.8 million, accounting for the proportion of the resident population of 37.4%. Resident population, the urban population of 1783.7 million, accounting for 86.2% of the resident population. The city's resident population birth rate 9.05 ‰, the mortality rate 4.31 ‰, the natural growth rate of 4.74 ‰. The city's resident population density of 1261 persons / sq km, an increase of 31 persons per square kilometer, compared with the previous year. 1297.5 million at the end of the city's registered population, an increase of 19.6 million over the previous year". That source is not reliable and the figures certainly don't match what is being stated also the geographical figure needs a verifiable source included and link to the exact source in English or can be translated correctly.--Navops47 (talk) 23:09, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

I also came across this from Demographia Definition of Urban Terms http://www.demographia.com/db-define.pdf this is what they say about China: Confusion about the Term "City" There is considerable confusion over the term "city" and urban terms, such as "urban area" and "metropolitan area." This can result in misleading comparisons and less than sufficiently precise academic research.In some instances, academic literature, including econometric analysis, has made comparisons between noncomparable entities, such as metropolitan areas, urban areas and municipalities (The semantic problem of cities as municipalities is discussed below). Sometimes divisions of metropolitan areas have been compared to entire metropolitan areas/Press reports routinely make comparisons between noncomparable urban entities. List of the largest cities sometimes mix metropolitan area populations (always representing the largest population of the two generic city forms), urban area populations and municipality populations. In one metropolitan area densities were compared to that of Manhattan, the extremely high density core of the New York metropolitan. The inappropriateness of this comparison is illustrated by the fact that Manhattan represents only 0.25 percent of the land area and less than 10 percent of the population of the New York metropolitan area. One of the most significant source s of confusion is the use of the term "city" to legally describe municipalities. With some notable exceptions, such as China, municipalities are virtually always smaller than their corresponding metropolitan areas or urban areas. By its very nature, urbanization in both the physical sense and the economic sense is not defined by the borders of single municipalities, large or small. Nonetheless, the larger municipalities in metropolitan areas or urban areas are sometimes confused as being the equivalent of the metropolitan area or urban area. These larger municipalities are more properly described as core municipalities or central municipalities. At the same time, a central municipality may be relatively small in relation to the corresponding urban area or metropolitan area.For example, according to the 2011 census, the central municipality of Melbourne had fewer than 100,000 residents according to the 2011 census , little more than two percent of the metropolitan area population. The central municipality of Adelaide had a population less than 20,020 11, less than two percent of the metropolitan area population. Even the central municipality of Sydney is comparatively small at 170,000 residents, less than four percent of the metropolitan area population. Further, outside China, nearly all metropolitan areas and urban areas contain multiple municipalities.--Navops47 (talk) 23:09, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Continued: For example,the Paris metropolitan area has nearly 1,800 municipalities accord ing to the latest census data, while the urban area has more than 400 municipalities. The New York metropolitan area has more than 700 municipalities and the Pittsburgh metropolitan area nearly 400 municipalities. There are few major metropolitan areas in the world that do not contain multiple cities. Only one metropolitan area (Auckland) with more than 1,000,000 population in Western Europe, the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia or New Zealand is overseen by a single municipal government Municipalities in China: Chinese cities (as the Chinese word is translated into English) are provincial level, sub-provincial level or prefectural level jurisdictions. In most cases, the municipalities of China are larger than their respective urban areas and in many cases they are larger than their respective metropolitan areas. CITIES IN CHINA Analysts are often confused by the “city” (“shi” or 市 in Chinese) terminology used in China. Most (if not all) Chinese urban areas are contained within a single city (“shi”). While Chinese “cities” are municipalities, they are far different from municipalities in the western world, by virtue of their geographical size and vast rural territories. A better rendering of the Chinese word “shi” would be region or prefectures. All Chinese cities have internal political subdivisions (often translated as counties or districts). The provincial level cities are Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Chongqing and represent the second level of government, under the central government, for their geographical areas. Each of the provinces and regions is divided into prefectural cities, sub-provincial level cities or other regions, each of which has considerable rural territory. Out of 333 prefectural level subdivisions of Chinese provinces and autonomous regions, 283 are cities, according to the China Statistical Yearbook.--Navops47 (talk) 23:09, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Two points. The Chinese reference is absolutely correct, I can read Chinese and the 万 character means 10,000 not million as you translated above. It is also the official population count based upon the census of China. That article from demographia is all correct as far as I can tell, and matches perfectly what we have here. This list is of "city proper" which, again, does not always match with what people colloquially think of as "city". We have a list of urban areas and metropolitan areas, both of which match different people's views of what a city is. "City proper" has a strict definition: the administrative boundary of a city which includes an urban core. By this definition, we miss quite a few Australian cities (Syndey is the most notable example) and conversely include rural lands and small towns in Chinese cities. I think the Criticalthinker above fails to understand that not all countries define "cities" the same way, and you can't pigeon-hole them to meet his personal notion of city proper. The best we can do is choose a definition, then include all that fall under this definition. Make caveats so others know that this definition will exclude some commonly thought of cities and include others. One list will not satisfy everyone's definition of a city. That is why we have 3 separate lists, each matching an individual definition of what makes a city. These definitions are not arbitrary, they are given by the United Nations. Again, if you want to dispute the definition by all means please do so, but you will need citations with a different definition of "city proper" to back it up. Mattximus (talk) 00:16, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

What you fail to realize is that if we're going off of administrative boundaries, solely, then Chongqing would be number one and EVERYONE has already agreed that's ridiculous. Most cities will be able to use their administrative boundaries, but there are cases where this is not possible, particularly with Chinese cities. These Chinese "Municipalities" in particular are not "cities" in any real sense most people understand the word. Period. There is no way anyone could seriously call Beijing Municipality a "local government." There is nothing local about a government that covers multiple cities. We are very close to having you removed from this discussion and this page, quite frankly. --Criticalthinker (talk) 01:43, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Again you offer no alternative reference, just personal opinion and threats. Frankly you are not adding to this conversation unless you can find a citation that gives a different definition for "city proper" that we can use, superior to that from the UN currently cited. Until then, we will use the UN definition, with the understanding that cities are defined differently in different countries and this is a compromise. Mattximus (talk) 12:14, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Criticalthinker, People may be more willing to debate these things further with you if you wouldn't be so belligerent and rude.108.196.40.52 (talk) 20:35, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

If we are serious about using the UN's 2003 definition of "city proper" (even though in the methodology paper in World Urbanization Prospects: the 2014 revision there are also the caveats "No attempts have been made to impose consistency in definitions across countries" and "it is advisable to base the measurement of a city’s population on territorial boundaries that may differ from those established by the accidents of administrative history") then the figures for Tokyo and Chongqing need to be changed (maybe others as well – I haven't looked at every single entry). Also Delhi needs to be re-added regardless of whether you think the National Capital Territory or the Delhi Municipal Corporation defines the city proper – they differ in population by less than 400,000. I happen to think that this article should be deleted. Cobblet (talk) 18:31, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Tokyo figure is correct. Official statistics show city proper at 8,967,665 and Metropolitan area 35,682,460. Here we have a slightly updated estimate for 2014, but I'm happy to go back to the official number. I agree Chongqing does need to change, and I don't know the municipal structure of India so I can't comment there. Why should the article be deleted? If you are not happy with this definition, lists exist for other definitions which are found here: World's largest cities. Personally, I like this definition as it's the only one of the 3 provided by the UN that is not arbitrary (it has defined borders). But you are also free to propose alternate definitions if you have a better one. Mattximus (talk) 21:06, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

The trouble is that the 23 special wards of Tokyo (which is what our current population figure refers to; they comprise the historical Tokyo Prefecture) are no longer a single political unit; rather they form part of Tokyo Metropolis. It's actually the same problem as with the Chongqing figure which is likely referring to Central Chongqing, which covers the same area as the former prefecture back when it was still part of Sichuan. Unfortunately I haven't found a better definition of "city proper", but if everybody including the UN admits this is simply not a meaningful way of comparing the sizes of different cities, I don't see the point of maintaining this list. Cobblet (talk) 23:26, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

That article you linked to is excellent! The article does in fact still use the term "city proper" for 89 out of the 232 countries, which means they have not given up on the concept and that they find it useful. It's meaningful, just not universal. The problem reflected in your article is that there is no definition that works in every country, they are too different. That's why the UN has several definitions which they employ depending on the country. Since we won't solve this problem in a wikipedia discussion board, we should stick with whatever the UN definitions are, and make lists reflecting all official definitions, recognizing each has considerable flaws. Mattximus (talk) 01:37, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

OK, well here's potentially one problem with applying the UN definition to Chinese prefecture-level divisions, a few of which have already been added (some most recently by you, I think). There are several dozens of prefecture-level cities in China with a population of over 3 million – for example, the entirety of Jiangsu Province is composed of these. If you're comfortable with adding Urumqi and Zhongshan, how comfortable are you with adding another hundred or so such Chinese "cities" to the list? The obvious objection to most of them is that they are primarily rural in nature (or worse: Urumqi contains large swaths of empty mountains and desert), but it seems the UN definition provides no room for such a distinction. A more nuanced objection might be that the district that serves as the capital of some of these "cities" might constitute the true "city proper". But that is definitely not going to be true in all cases. Cobblet (talk) 02:49, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

I also acknowledge the problem with China, and if we added all Chinese city proper with over 3 million we could have to add exactly 54, not hundreds. Urumqi is actually less controversial since those deserts you quote don't actually have many people in them at all, nearly the whole 3 million is right in the traditional downtown core (unlike the other Chinese "Cities"). Mattximus (talk) 12:44, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

If you took out the suburban/rural Midong District, Dabancheng District and Ürümqi County from Urumqi's population it would not exceed three million. As it currently stands, Urumqi's population density is far lower than any other city on the list. Prefectural-level cities in China should not be compared to cities in other countries, but to higher-level divisions (e.g. counties like Cook and Harris in the US, rather than Chicago or Houston proper). Cobblet (talk) 17:24, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

Should Tōkyō-to's precedence be followed, for cases like Peking and Chungking, and perhaps cases like Halifax, Auckland, so that only city districts are included but not rural districts, satellite cities or outlying bedroom communities? 58.153.97.134 (talk) 17:33, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

This list is following the United Nations definition of "city proper", which is the administrative region that encompasses the city core. This can be strange in cases of Australia and China. Australia has very tiny "city proper" that do not include any suburbs, and so are not on this list. China is the opposite, most cities include very large areas around the city core. However no definition will capture the laws of every country, so this list is the best attempt at following administrative boundaries. There are other lists that meet other definitions. Three of them are found here World's largest cities. Does that answer your question? Mattximus (talk) 20:15, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

What about the example of Tokyo, which figure on this list covers only the 23 special cities on the eastern half of the prefecture? Should it be followed for cases like Beijing and Chongqing? 58.153.97.134 (talk) 21:12, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to classify Tokyo, there is a "metropolis government" (mayor: Yōichi Masuzoe) but also like you mention 23 sub sections each with an elected council. I think we should probably choose the Metropolis population (13,185,502) to reflect the administrative division for this list and have the metropolitan population in the List of metropolitan areas by population to be 35,682,460. But I'm open to alternatives. Mattximus (talk) 21:30, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 16 June 2015

Peshawar, Pakistan, has a larger population than Izmir. The population of Peshawar is 4,201,659 whereas Izmir has a population of 4,113,072. Peshawar should be on no. 61 of the list, instead of Izmir.

Hani1640 (talk) 07:26, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

@Hani1640: Do you have a reliable source for these statistics? dalahäst ^{(let's talk!)} 07:42, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

RfC best resolution of definition of title and content

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

We appear to be at a deadlock of the definition of city proper within this article and the grounds for inclusion of some of the cities and data in it. This UNICEF document here: http://www.unicef.org/sowc2012/pdfs/SOWC-2012-DEFINITIONS.pdf simply defines a city proper as " The population living within the administrative boundaries of a city e.g Washington, D.C. because city boundaries do not regularly adapt to accommodate population increases, the concepts of Urban Agglomeration or Metropolitan Area are often used to improve the comparability of measurements of city populations across countries and over time" UNICEF (2012), However different countries apply different definitions previous discussions as shown above included counter arguments for including Chinese cities in the list based on this Chinese expert's views on the subject " Professor Kam Wing Chan University of Washington in the United States, who has made a career out of correcting people's exaggerated claims about Chinese population statistics, explains that what China calls a municipality or city is better understood as a province. Many of the 30 million people who are said to live in the city of Chongqing are actually agricultural workers living in a rural setting, in fact, he says, the area is so huge it's about the size of Austria. 'Doom and gloom' "And if you were to travel from the downtown area to some of the peripheral areas where those 30 million live, it might take a day or two because the road conditions are not that good. So, this cannot be possibly called a city. Because when we call a place a city the general understanding is that we're talking about a commuting zone." Professor Chan calculates that a more reasonable estimate of the urban population of Chongqing is six or seven million. The largest city in China is actually Shanghai. It is commonly thought to have a population of 20 million, but Professor Chan thinks 16 million is a better estimate. He says everyone just loves to think China's cities are bigger than they actually are. He has even had to correct fellow experts at a world conference on global megacities of the future".

Possible ways to resolve this situation would involve either

• Cutting content so as to fit in with some agreed definition's for criteria inclusion which must take into account published experts views in this area at the moment the article solely rely's on one source.

--Navops47 (talk) 02:19, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree with your solution, and it's basically how the page was structured prior to this having risen its head as an issue with a single editor, recently. I'd just like to add that city propers for Chinese "cities" isn't completely ambiguous or arbitrary. At least for the larger cities, I believe each page includes a map of administrative divisions within these huge territories which display the component districts of the territory making them as either "central city", inner-suburban, outer-suburban, and some districts even not being associated with the urban area being either spatially and culturally independent urban or rural areas in their own right. Using Beijing, as an example, it would seem the city proper is the city center and inner-suburbs (though, I guess you could make an argument for the outer suburbs), while the four districts labeled "outer Beijing" clearly do not constitute a part of the city proper. Same goes for Shanghai, mostly, though I guess "outer suburbs" are even more likely than in Beijing to constitute part of the city proper. I believe these distinctions are statistically official in China, BTW, and not something some wiki editor just defined him or herself. And, we could go down the list for China, quite frankly. For Chongqing, it's obvious that the city proper are simply those districts labeled "central" and "the suburbs." --Criticalthinker (talk) 04:38, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Clearly there is a dispute and agree with the points you have made whilst editors here may understand the subject matter the other point here is your average general reader who account for majority of page view traffic are confused in understanding their perception of City and how the article conclusively states through the statistics can be as large if not larger than a sovereign state as per the comments from the first IP contributor's who had an issue with this I have also registered and the RFC at the feedback request service--Navops47 (talk) 06:01, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

We should also make it clear that there are many definitions for what makes a city, and wikipedia has several lists to accommodate at least 3 of these definitions. Each list should have it's own clear definition so as to avoid arguments like this in the future. Mattximus (talk) 13:22, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

What does the inserted 'Doom and gloom' mean in this context? Activist (talk) 00:29, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

• Looking at the preceding text, I assume that it's shorthand for an inferred supposed unsustainability of a city whose geographic size or total habitation has grown beyond practical limits. Is that correct? Activist (talk) 00:38, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Professor Kwan used the term doom and gloom scenario in reference to Western experts misunderstanding China's definition of city's in relation to this article the argument was how can a city proper be of the size's stated in the table in it he says specifically these Chinese cities should be thought of as provinces really and Western experts need to revise their approach in defining Chinese urban centers by populations sizes etc.--Navops47 (talk) 09:31, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Semi-protected edit request on 13 July 2015

|41 | Toronto || 6,055,700 | 7,124.15 | 850 | CA$ |- Asajmera (talk) 22:11, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

References

• Oppose Toronto city proper has 2.6 million as of the last census (2011). It might be squeaking past 2.8 now, but nowhere near your estimate above. That looks like the whole GTA. Mattximus (talk) 00:48, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Delhi?

How come Delhi, India isn't on this list? It should be in the top 15, at least. Coulraphobic123 (talk) 03:04, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Honestly, with how we're including entire municipalities and prefecture level "cities" with China - especially when you consider they have actual lower levels of local government within those "cities" that would cover would would widely be agreed upon as a "city proper" - it really does seem weird to exclude Delhi in its form as the National Capital Territory just because its local government was split into three different local governments within the National Capital Territory. The National Capital Territory is, too, "only" 1,438 square kilometers, versus, say, the 6,340.5 sq km for Beijing's "city" of which the city proper only feels a tiny portion. Anyway, this is going to continue to fall on deaf ears, but I agree with you on the ridiculousness of all of this. --Criticalthinker (talk) 16:04, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

That's the reason why Delhi isn't included? That's stupid! And it's not like the population of Delhi would include New Delhi either, as that is a separate municipality, correct? And I think the National Capital Territory of India, of which Delhi is coterminous, is almost entirely urbanized unlike Chongqing (granted, the population for the city here is just the urbanized area, but nonetheless...) I would appreciate if others would join in on the discussion. Coulraphobic123 (talk) 02:57, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it would help anything. This was discussed literally a month or two ago and it was a discussion that filled the entire page. I hate to be cynical about it, but there was no concensus on changing anything. BTW, the strange thing about China's listings is the inconsistent nature of what's included as "city proper" even within the "cities" on the list. As you noted, Chongqing is added on the list as "Central Chongqing" which is easily more sensible than adding the entire "city." But, then Beijing is added is added in it entirety despite the fact that the six inner districts not only cover far more than what anyone would call a "city proper" but nearly cover the entire urban agglomeration. There are six additional districts outside of this which would constitute the entire metropolitan area. The four districts outside of that are almost impossible to argue to even be a part of the metropolitan area, let alone the city proper. The Town of Yanqing in Yanqing County, in fact, is literally on the other side of the mountains from urban Beijing. It's not even part of the contiguous urban area, let alone being part of the "city proper." And, yet, Beijing is added in its "Municipality" form. Even in the less ridiculous example of Shanghai, Chongming County - a literal set of far-flung islands - is not even a part of the contiguous urban settlement of Shanghai, let alone Shanghai's "city proper." So, you have all of these multiple glaring examples, yet the nearly entirely urbanized capital territory of Delhi gets left off due to a technicality? Like I've said in the past, I am staunchly against the inclusion of localities such as Sydney and Melbourne, as cities in Australia generally don't have local government associated with their "city propers" and there are not even regional governments which could be called city propers. But, there are some cases in which there are an associated provincial/regional governments drawn tightly enough to the actual urban settlement - and this provincial/regional government essentially acting as a special local government - that they could be understood to be a "city proper." Greater London is a perfect example of this. Delhi's National Capital Territory would be another good example. Each of them have actual district or municipal local governments beneath their regional government level, but the prime organ of local governance is at the regional (in London's case) or territorial (in Delhi's case) level. --Criticalthinker (talk) 07:29, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Karachi!

Can somebody update the Karachi population and reference which is 23,800,000. Jjkajaja (talk) 18:58, 23 July 2015 (UTC) |-

Population figures of cities in Pakistan is quite problematic.

First, the latest population Census in Pakistan was taken in 1998. They tried to run one in 2011 but I haven't seen any official results so I assume that it was cancelled or declared as unreliable (see Census in Pakistan). From what I recall, there were some Census figures listed here and there, with a.o. a population figure for Karachi of over 20 million. But, my guess is that they were calculations from the Housing Census, which was carried out before the PC, and those results seems to have been considered as over-count and not reliable (see a.o. this article).

Additionally, there is the question of what should be considered as a "city" or "city proper" in Pakistan. There has been some re-organization of administrative units since the 1998 Census, with the introduction of "City Districts".

Further, City Population is a private site, where the owner is doing his own calculations for his list of Principal Agglomerations of the World. So, that can't be considered as a reliable source.

We can use the 1998 Census results, as it's the latest official population figures. But, it doesn't feel right to use 17 year old data. My suggestion is to use UN:s calculations for World Urbanization Prospects, the 2014 revision. There is one problem with this, and it's that the UN base they calculations for cities in Pakistan on the definitions from 1998, and haven't adjusted the figures for the definitions of "city districts". But, I still think it's the best source for updates until a new Census is taken in Pakistan.--Pjred (talk) 23:39, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Lagos

I went to the website for the Lagos population figure, but can't seem to find a citation for their figure. I realize there are some major disputes for the population of Lagos, but the official population count put the population for the ENTIRE State of Lagos at approximately 9 million, and the statistical area of Lagos city doesn't even include all of the local governments in the state. I fail to see how CityMayors information is more credible than the Nigerian's census data. Apart from the dispute with the census data, I'm aware that Lagos is fast-growing, but that doesn't even look like an actual scientific population estimate. It looks like at best it's a population projection, and we don't deal in those on this article. --Criticalthinker (talk) 00:54, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

The fact that reliable population estimates simply do not exist for "city propers" of many developing countries (e.g. Karachi, Kinshasa) is just another reason why maintaining this list is a hopeless cause at the present time. Cobblet (talk) 06:38, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 20 August 2015

Check your own page for Bogota: it says 7.9 MILLION (13 MILLION with the metropolitan areas) Hopefully, your own website is a very good source to cite! 216.221.71.162 (talk) 00:48, 20 August 2015 (UTC)In your list of most populated cities, you DO NOT have Bogota, COLOMBIA listed: according to you. it has a population of about 7.9 MILLION. If you include the metropolitan area, it is about 13 MILLION. This is from your own Wikipedia website!

Already done Bogota is listed at #31. Cannolis (talk) 01:14, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 28 August 2015

Multan has a population of over 4 million people. Below source from Wikipedia states, according to the 1998 census of Pakistan it had a population of 3,116,851. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multan_District

82.2.168.165 (talk) 10:56, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Do you have a source for that claim? Mattximus (talk) 03:12, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. That refers to the district. This list is of cities proper, which in 1998 had a population of 1,197,384 Cannolis (talk) 07:27, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Rome

Shouldn't Rome now be included on this list? New Italian laws governing cities in Italy now place Rome as a Metropolitan City with a population of 4,321,24. That would place Rome now as number 60 on this list.108.196.40.52 (talk) 12:30, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I believe the Metropolitan City of Rome replaced the old Province of Rome, and did not merge the municipalities of the Province. For example, Guidonia Montecelio, Fiumicino, Pomezia... etc all still exist and haven't been merged into the municipality of Rome. Rome itself has 2,869,461 people as of the 2014 estimate. Mattximus (talk) 13:23, 7 September 2015 (UTC)