Comment by rwmj
1 day ago
Seems to depend a bit on how you define "city proper". Wikipedia has two lists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities#List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity#List_of_megacities
which disagree with this (and each other) on which city is largest.
They should replace this with a density metric. If a city is big enough, it becomes just "cities" next to each other. The difference is in central density and time from the extremities to the center. In this case, Chongqing, HongKong and Paris are denser than say Los Angeles; even though the Los Angeles metro area has a comparable/higher number of people.
Jacksonville, FL also claims to be the largest city in the contiguous US... by area. It's not a small or bad city, but not even in the top 10 in most other metrics.
The first list appears to come from one U.N. report where they're using completely different standards for different cities - some are using population estimates for the municipality, others population estimates of just the urban core, and others still using population estimates for the entire region.
As far as I can tell, Tokyo is at the top of the list because because they seem to be using the estimates for the entire region. Other estimates for Tokyo's population - even on Wikipedia - are less than half the number listed there.
"Chongqing, which is the largest city proper in the world by population, comprises a huge administrative area of 82,403 km2, around the size of Austria. However, more than 70% of its 30-million population are agricultural workers living in a rural setting."