Istanbul, Instanbul, Turkey: 15,840,900īut as before, that definition of the city isn’t particularly useful – as it shunts the Continental giant of Paris to the relegation zone purely because the administrative area of the arrondissements is tiny.And then, the size rankings change again:īy city limits (the first definition), here’s how things look:

So, this list included European Turkey, gives Istanbul the benefit of the doubt, and stretch Europe as far as the Ural mountains in Russia. There’s the EU, the Schengen Area, the Customs Union, the EEA, the Continent, and then the sticky issue of Europe itself. Because Europe itself isn’t that simple, as we’re about to find out. So, that’s sorted, right? It’s London, or Paris, or possibly the Ruhr.Įxcept, no. These figures from Eurostat, the statistics arm of the European Union, offer that view: Demographia’s 2022 figures are produced on that basis, and that comes up with a similar picture, but with a very different front-runner:īut to everyone who grew up sort of near a big place but not really in the big place, and got sick of explaining to visiting Americans exactly what and where Hemel Hempstead was, there’s another handy definition that produces a picture of the metropolitan area, or functional urban region. There’s a variant version of this definition, too: one that includes areas that are generally built-up but aren’t specifically centred on one particular city. But the definition doesn’t stretch as far as satellite cities: so London’s commuter belt, with its stretches of the evil greenbelt as a dividing line doesn’t count, but the Parisian suburbs, very much close to and part of Paris proper, do.Īnd the results of this measure are, obviously, rather different: The core idea is that by discounting rivers, parks, roads, and industrial fields, urban agglomerations are built-up areas where houses are not more than 200m apart. There are all sorts of caveats and rules that go into these measurements, from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which published its population estimates for 2015 in its World Urbanisation Prospects tome. On the other hand, if you broaden the net and start talking about ‘urban agglomerations’ – basically, cities and the bits around them that also function as part of the city – we get a very different picture. To avoid getting bogged down in the detail of each individual census, national statistics office, or city population office, here’s the listing of European cities by population within city limits at the time of press.

Largest cities in the world