city sizes

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i'm looking for a site that has the population sizes of all the cities in the world. (or, at least, europe and america)

― gareth (gareth), Sunday, 1 December 2002 23:42 (twenty-two years ago)

― Penny Lane (Penny Lane), Sunday, 1 December 2002 23:54 (twenty-two years ago)

that site is good, but if you click for the cities of the world it gives you the population for the entire metropolitan area (ie washington includes baltimore! manchester includes bolton)

if you go to each country individually, then it gives you figures for the greater metropolitan areas, but also, more importantly, figures for just the cities themselves...

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 00:30 (twenty-two years ago)

england in 1991:

London LON 6638109
Birmingham WML 965928
Liverpool MER 481786
Sheffield SYS 431607
Leeds WYS 424194
Bristol BRI 407992
Manchester MAN 402889
Leicester LEI 318518
Kingston upon Hull KUH 310636
Coventry WML 299316
Bradford WYS 289376
Nottingham NOT 270222
Stoke-on-Trent STR 266543
Wolverhampton WML 257943
Plymouth PLY 245295
Derby DER 223836
Reading REA 213474
Southampton SHT 210138

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 00:31 (twenty-two years ago)

america in 2000:

New York NY 8008278
Los Angeles CA 3694820
Chicago IL 2896016
Houston TX 1953631
Philadelphia PA 1517550
Phoenix AZ 1321045
San Diego CA 1223400
Dallas TX 1188580
San Antonio TX 1144646
Detroit MI 951270
San Jose CA 894943
Indianapolis IN 791926
San Francisco CA 776733
Jacksonville FL 735617
Columbus OH 711470
Austin TX 656562
Baltimore MD 651154
Memphis TN 650100
Milwaukee WI 596974
Boston MA 589141
Washington DC 572059
El Paso TX 563662
Seattle WA 563374
Denver CO 554636
Nashville-Davidson TN 545524
Charlotte NC 540828
Fort Worth TX 534694
Portland OR 529121
Oklahoma City OK 506132

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 00:34 (twenty-two years ago)

bradford is the 11th biggest english city, putting it relative to san jose in terms of importance. in actual size bradford is about the same as buffalo

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 00:36 (twenty-two years ago)

uh shouldnt atl be on that list

― s trife (simon_tr), Monday, 2 December 2002 00:38 (twenty-two years ago)

Louisville, Kentucky, through merging and redistricting, just upped their official greater metro count to over 700,000 this past week.

― donut bitch (donut), Monday, 2 December 2002 00:41 (twenty-two years ago)

city population of atlanta=416474, but metropolitan area is like 4 million, does it have a lot of stuff outside the city borders?

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 00:42 (twenty-two years ago)

where are KC, NOLA, St Louis? they're all larger than San Antonio (which is equal to Dallas?) Austin more populous than Baltimore or Memphis? pretty misleading.

― Aaron A., Monday, 2 December 2002 00:53 (twenty-two years ago)

cant speak for the american cities, but i'd say the english figures were accurate (although i'm sure hull is smaller than that, and manchester bigger, but then hull isnt surrounded by anything, and manchester is surrounded by other places so has a much greater aggregate size, but the city itself is only part of that...)

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 00:57 (twenty-two years ago)

This is offtopic, so don't let it distract you from actually helping Gareth, but is there any rule for when you can call a US town a city? Going through California we saw lots of town boundary signs saying "___ City (population 300)" and similar, which just seems really weird to a Brit from what is a small market town (and it possibly only qualifies as a town rather than a village because it was the main farmers' market in the area hundreds of years ago) with a population of just under 10k.

And yeah, those figures without the metropolitan areas are also somewhat misleading, the thought of Bristol being bigger than Manchester just seems odd. If only it had the same public transport, nightlife, etc. I remain troubled by the way there just ISN'T much in the south except London. I want to find somewhere to live down here...

― Rebecca (reb), Monday, 2 December 2002 01:01 (twenty-two years ago)

detroit wasn't able to fake their way over a million this time eh? bummer. nothing like a city's population contracting by nearly 50% in the last 40 years.

― keith (keithmcl), Monday, 2 December 2002 01:08 (twenty-two years ago)

How does that punk town Phoenix get to claim more population than San Diego, dammit? Besides which, the entire population comes out to San Diego for summer anyway, so we know where their true loyalties lie.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 2 December 2002 01:23 (twenty-two years ago)

yeh the actual city of Detroit has been gettin a bad rap lately...everybody's moving into the 'burbs as quickly as possible. It's kind of freaky to see all the abandoned houses and empty neighboorhoods...like a B-horror flick. Oh and villages and towns and the like all have certain population cut-offs and quotas, so officially you could have a ____ city that's actually a village, but the names really don't matter that much...they're usually historical or aesthetic. I don't remember the exact unmbers, but I know they're in an almanac I read back home a long time ago.

― B, Monday, 2 December 2002 01:34 (twenty-two years ago)

Atlanta and St. Lou are famous for the urban sprawl/white flight/mass exodus to suburbia sort of thing.

― bnw (bnw), Monday, 2 December 2002 01:47 (twenty-two years ago)

yes i am shocked by the size of phoenix!

― ron (ron), Monday, 2 December 2002 01:54 (twenty-two years ago)

National Geographic last month (November?) had a feature on city sizes and population growth.

― A Nairn (moretap), Monday, 2 December 2002 02:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Umm...has anyone talking about Detroit been downtown lately? I can look out of my window and see no less than seven building renovations happening, and I know of several new restaurants and bars that have opened in the past few weeks. Sure, it's far from being NYC, but it ain't exactly Gary, Indiana either. Unfortunately, we suffer from the prevailing attitude of "hey, they had riots in the '60s, it probably isn't safe to go there". Most of the abandoned neighborhoods are not in the downtown area, and those few that remain are being knocked down to make room for townhouses and such.

Although there isn't a single sushi shop within the city limits--in some respects there's still a long way to go here.

― webcrack (music=crack), Monday, 2 December 2002 02:16 (twenty-two years ago)

hmmm ... now that Wolverhampton has become a city, it would seem that Reading is the largest *town* in England (and I assume the UK), which I've suspected for years. has Reading ever applied for city status? it's a damn sight bigger than Guildford, which applied last time ...

― robin carmody (robin carmody), Monday, 2 December 2002 02:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Hmm....don't know bout that....exactly what part of Detroit are you from? Because there seems to be quite a difference throughout. From which part are you? Last I was there, there were quite a few abandoned and falling houses/buildings by the southern dearborn border. Granted there are quite a few rebuilding projects going on, but in the last few years Detroit has been considered a place to move out of, not into...much like Ohio. And by the way, there's a Sushi place on Sarena street..haven't been over that way in quite a while though...

― B, Monday, 2 December 2002 02:38 (twenty-two years ago)

i dont know robin, isnt stoke still a town?

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 07:02 (twenty-two years ago)

i'm pretty sure both manchester and sheffield have larger populations than liverpool.

― michael wells (michael w.), Monday, 2 December 2002 09:18 (twenty-two years ago)

Also check: Population.com - UK

― DJ Martian (djmartian), Monday, 2 December 2002 09:37 (twenty-two years ago)

aha, the population.com list has Stoke but not Reading so it must be a rather pedantic list of (real actual) cities, doesn't get as far down the list as Ripon though...

although it does have Slough, does Slough have a cathedral???

― CarsmileSteve (CarsmileSteve), Monday, 2 December 2002 10:04 (twenty-two years ago)

whoops, it does have Reading, silly me...

― CarsmileSteve (CarsmileSteve), Monday, 2 December 2002 10:06 (twenty-two years ago)

the use of cathedral as definer of cityhood is achronistic, anglocentric, and bollocks. i am only interested in the population size of the place

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 10:09 (twenty-two years ago)

ah no, i was just assuming (incorrectly) that as i couldn't see Reading on the list that it was just "cities" in the original sense, and the compiler on population.com was being a little literal...

as i learnt from watching melvyn bragg's thing on english last nite the word city comes from old french and was given to us by the normans, which is nice.

― CarsmileSteve (CarsmileSteve), Monday, 2 December 2002 10:17 (twenty-two years ago)

the use of cathedral as definer of cityhood is achronistic, anglocentric

Anglocentric? Brechin, Elgin, Dunfermline etc

― Billy Dods (Billy Dods), Monday, 2 December 2002 10:52 (twenty-two years ago)

well, yeah, i actually meant christicentric (sp?) i guess

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 2 December 2002 10:58 (twenty-two years ago)

Uh huh, no Christians in Scotland.

Maybe cities should be defined by whether or not they have a Starbucks or Domino's pizza.

― Billy Dods (Billy Dods), Monday, 2 December 2002 11:15 (twenty-two years ago)

in principle I agree with you, Gareth - it's just that there are a few places (Winchester, Wells, Ely, Truro) which are *officially* cities because they have cathedrals, but are obviously medium-sized towns in all but name. nobody thinks of them as "cities" in any meaningful sense of the term today. in fact one such place - Rochester in Kent - has IIRC actually given up its city status and become merely a constituent part of the Medway area (it merges into Chatham; there is no meaningful boundary between the two towns).

Stoke is *definitely* officially a city, because the football club are called Stoke City, and that wouldn't be allowed otherwise (when Swansea got city status the club changed from Town to City - 1970, from memory). Reading is a major town which has ballooned, not least because of Microsoft's presence, and will surely be a city within 10 or 20 years.

you can get a good sense of the towns which have grown fastest by listing the places which used to be one parliamentary constituency but are now split into two - Reading, Swindon, Poole ...

― robin carmody (robin carmody), Tuesday, 3 December 2002 04:01 (twenty-two years ago)

Philly's another town that's lost a lot of folks over the past several decades (a la Detroit and St. Louis). i mean, it wasn't that long ago when the place was no. 4, not that swampy polluted Texas shithole called Houston.

but hey, it's still better than Boston. same goes for Baltimore. and both Philadelphia and Baltimore have the numbers to prove it!

― Tad (llamasfur), Tuesday, 3 December 2002 07:29 (twenty-two years ago)

"city population of atlanta=416474, but metropolitan area is like 4 million, does it have a lot of stuff outside the city borders?"

yes! Andy to thread...

"in actual size bradford is about the same as buffalo"

gareth's perverse desire to include buffalo on his mini american roadtrip finally explained.

"Anglocentric?"

We certainly couldn't accuse anyone on this board of being that!

― Mary (Mary), Tuesday, 3 December 2002 07:39 (twenty-two years ago)

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