What is the biggest city in the world?

Question

I think that Tokyo, but i'm not quite sure

Answer 1

There are some problems in determining the correct answer.

Where do you draw the line on where the city ends? For Tokyo, do you include Shinjuku and other districts?

Some governments over-report or under-report how many people there actually are due to political pressure.

Do you measure it by the number of people who live there, work there or the physical size of the city?

Answer 2

There is always 2 different ways of looking at this question:

Do you only look at the numbers from the city itself or take agglomeration into consideration?

I think the second is the most appropriate way as many cities (like Tokyo) have grown together with other cities and cannot be separated anymore.

Tokyo has grown together with Yokohama for example. It is the single biggest agglomeration in the whole world. New York is quite a bit away from that although New York is also in the top 5.

After Tokyo there is Mexico City, Sao Paolo, then New York.

One thing though: Although NY is not the biggest agglomeratio it is by far the most impresive one. No other city including the ones mentioned above has so many skyscrapers per square kilometer than NY.

Answer 3

Seoul and Sao Paulo has the world most population, with Seoul in south Korean having just a fraction more.
Rank City Country Population
1 SEOUL South Korea 10,231,000
2 São Paulo Brazil 10,009,000
3 Bombay India 9,925,000
4 JAKARTA Indonesia 9,373,000
5 Karachi Pakistan 9,339,000
6 MOSKVA (Moscow) Russia 8,297,000
7 Istanbul Turkey 8,260,000
8 MEXICO (Mexico City) Mexico 8,235,000
9 Shanghai China 8,214,000
10 TOKYO Japan 8,130,000
11 New York (NY) USA 8,008,000
12 BANGKOK Thailand 7,506,700
13 BEIJING China 7,362,000
14 Delhi India 7,206,000
15 LONDON UK 7,074,000
16 HongKong China 6,843,000
17 CAIRO Egypt 6,800,000
18 TEHRAN Iran 6,758,000
19 BOGOTA Colombia 6,422,000
20 Bandung Indonesia 5,919,000

Answer 4

Tokyo is the most populous city, then Mexico City, then Seoul, then New York. Some of the answerers here are citing accurate sources, but it all depends HOW you measure a city. Is it the city limits, the metropolitan area, the geographical size in meters, etc.

The following answer was a well-thought out response I thought you would be interested in reading. Despite what some others below would have you believe, these people did their homework and provide some good insight into this question.

This was asked of ASK Yahoo - and here's their answer:

Dear Yahoo!:
What is the biggest city in the world?
Monica
Maracaibo, Venezuela
Dear Monica:
This one wasn't easy. First, we had to get a handle on what exactly it means to be the "biggest city." Is it by land area? Is it by population? The former seems a little arbitrary, but the latter might be hard to pin down, especially since once-distinct cities have begun to merge into huge sprawling "metropolitan areas."

That said, we did manage to come up with an answer to your question. We used a number of different resources to get a consensus -- everything from Yahoo! to Google to Infoseek, but in the end, we found a reasonable number of sites that agreed on the subject.

First, we'll share the main dissenter, The InfoPlease Almanac, which listed Seoul, Korea, as the most populous city in the world. They went on to list Sao Paolo, Brazil, in second place and Bombay, India, in third. We were happy to see their comprehensive list of the 50 most populous cities, but they chose to only count inhabitants of within the actual city limits. Later, as we searched further, it became apparent that most sources prefer to judge "urban areas" rather than "cities proper."

Next, we present City Population, an entire site dedicated to "the largest cities in the world." Their unique Java-powered map illustrates the principal agglomerations of the world, again, using population as the determining factor. They list Tokyo as the largest city, with more than 34 million inhabitants. New York City is second and Seoul third.

We also found a fascinating page from Slippery Rock University's Geography Department, titled Supporting Material on Settlements. They offer the most populous cities from 1975 (Tokyo, New York, Shanghai), as well as 1900, 1800, 1700, 1600, 900, and a projection of cities in 2015.

Finally, we stumbled onto a collection of geographic extremes that not only concurs that Tokyo is the world's most populous city, but also offers Australia's Mount Isa as the largest city by area.

Answer 5

The greater Tokyo area is actually divided into three big cities-Tokyo, Kawasaki and Yokohama plus innumerable suburbs which is why it isn't considered the biggest city in the world. It's defiantly the largest urban conglomeration in the world however.

Answer 6

Everything stated above is wrong, even the ASK Yahoo! thing, which makes me quite sad. Allow me to correct the above misconceptions...

The Tokyo metropolitan area is the largest in the world, with a population estimate of 35,000,000. The second largest metropolitan area is Mexico City, with 30,000,000 inhabitants.

However, those two figures consider entire metropolitan areas, not mere cities; and Tokyo alone, as well as Mexico City alone, have well below even 10,000,000 inhabitants.

The larget sole city by population is Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, with a population of nearly 13,000,000.

If we look at Maracaibo, Venezuela, we see that it doesn't come close, with a population of only 3,000,000.

Answer 7

I know the crazyist city is New York.
Man that city is crazy. I love it.

But the most fun is I think Tokyo.

Answer 8

Tokyo in japan

Answer 9

Las Vegas

Answer 10

well tokyo if we're talkin bout size most populated is mexico city it has 30 million people living in it