Comment by paxys
3 days ago
These rankings always consider city to be a contiguous metro area, regardless of how internal lines are drawn. Otherwise most of them wouldn't show up on the list at all. "Los Angeles" for example has close to 200 indiviudal cities.
Demographics and geography approaches this through the notion of "metropolitan statistical area" (MSA) in the US, or equivalent concepts elsewhere. An MSA is defined as a "geographical region with a relatively high population density at its core and close economic ties throughout the region".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area>
Other rough equivalents are metropolitan areas (UK), census metropolitan areas (Canada), functional urban areas (FUA) (EU), urban agglomerations (India). All of these use functional and behavioural characteristics to get around simple boundary-demarkation. Urbanisations may even span national borders, as with the greater Basel region, Lake Constance, or Strasbourg-Ortenau.
That is true for this report, based on the methodology
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
However, instead of an arbitrary administrative definition, they used an arbitrary cutoff for population density.
Thus it still comes down to a subjective drawing of lines around the city.
and Los Angeles City would still be on the list
Los Angeles city has 3.8 million people so no, it is nowhere close to a megacity.