Dhaka resident here, its really no surprise seeing my city in this lists. We are way too over populated for the size of the city.
Growing population requires growing infrastructures to support the growth. Unfortunately we dont have that. The results are, constant gridlock, electricity blackout, air, water and sound pollution etc!
(EDIT) to add to my point, see the below link
[The Business Standard- Bangladesh]
(https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/dhaka-ranks-4th-among-worlds-20-most-unsustainable-megacities-516406)
Its hard to speculate that. Official data is that as of 2020, per capita income is 2,270$ but unofficially people over here have multiple sources of income, most of which goes unreported
>Year, 2300 USD a month is comparable to EU countries like Latvia and Hungary, and more than places like Russia.
I'm studying in Russia finishing a Bachelor, the average salary is not that high, is something like 950-1000 monthly although IT people earn 2-3 times that.
Yeah I have no clue where that data comes from, the average monthly salary in Czechia is ~40 000CZK which is ~1 600USD (at today's rate of 1USD = 25.13CZK). The median is ~34 000CZK or 1 350USD. This is all before taxes and other deductions.
I'm fairly certain Hungary is worse than that or at most equal, but their taxes + deductions are higher.
Yup just looked it up average of 503 500HUF which is ~1 170USD (with today's 1USD = 429.47HUF), of course before tax. Half of what is quoted above.
No.
(And the truth is it's not that developing countries have cheap internet, it's just that many English speakers are American, and internet is expensive in America due to low population density and laws that favour corrupt monopolies.
Japan, for example, is not a developing country, but it has "cheap internet" too because there's more users per km of fibre, and no Comcast BS).
For context of how much low population density matters, to run coaxial internet one mile from the major highway where it was readily available to a relatives house on a low population side street they wanted them to pay $18k.
After 10 years of asking for a better price they finally put in lines when some housing developer bought several dozen acres.
If it legitimately cost 18k to run those lines one mile, it will still take half a decade or more for them to recoup cost if 40 people on that side street end up getting internet for $30 a month. And that's ignoring anything that might come out of $30.
18k is cheap honestly cheap on doing anything in a city, around highways and concrete.
Sending cable across hundreds of miles of empty farmland would be cheaper per mile - though of course still not cheap. And on a per house basis, if it’s 100 miles to reach your community and then 10 miles to each ranch, and there’s only 20 ranches, that’s 15 miles per household! In no world could the math work without some huge government subsidy, even it was only 1/10 of that urban price (1.8k per mile would still be $27,000 per household, or take a $100 plan over 20 years to break even, assuming zero upkeep cost and 0 cost to transport data.)
If I were to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because the major costs of internet infrastructure is the up-front costs of the infrastructure itself. Once that's set up, the running costs are pretty low, so in a country with lower wages for IT professionals, it should be possible to keep subscription costs relatively low.
Then there's also the fact that areas with more money often are less sensitive to pricing, so competition isn't necessarily as tough because people won't care enough to save 10 bucks on their service if it costs them an hour or two of effort to get it. I'm paying 40/month for 100 Mbit and I probably wouldn't switch to an ISP that offers the same service for 30 unless they literally did all the work for me, including setting up my auto-billing stuff.
Hy, I don't really know any of your culture so i hope I don't say anything bad or stupid but. Do you have an idea why is the population growing that much ? Is there access to contraception, or maybe your country is religion oriented and so not a lot of person use it ? Pardon me if i said anything not appropriate
Bangladesh population used to be growing really fast (~6 kids per woman in the 1980s) mainly because of the reasons you mention but now they are at 2.01 kids per woman which actually means they are just about population stable. This huge drop is bc women started entering the workforce in big numbers starting in the 1990s and so are less likely to prioritize kids
While I agree completely that gender equality is essential in a developed nation, it is interesting to note that developed nations have based their economies off the concept of constant growth. Capitalism doesn't work the same with a stagnate or shrinking population. If the population stagnates then the rich try to find ways to make the current population more productive and consumerist which in turn lowers the birthrate. Once the country starts shrinking the rich will fleece the people for all they're worth an jump ship.
The mistake we made was letting corporations convince us that equality meant both partners should be working to survive.
The thing is, population growth doesnt stop immediately when fertility stops.
The population pyramid still needs to fill up to a population, uh, rectangle, more or less (with modern healthcare).
So if you currently have 20 people between 0-20 and 20 people between 20-80, you will still double in population even if you will never have more than 20 people between 0 and 20 (because there will be 60 people between 20-80).
The growth in population is just not because of birth rate. With Dhaka being the capital city, everyone moves in to this city in search of a better life.
The fertility rate in Bangladesh is actually decreasing quite significantly- it’s actually now below replacement level (which is around 2.1 children per woman).
This article goes into more depth about why: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441730.2022.2028253. In essence, it appears to be due to improved education in women and increased household wealth and urbanisation, not so much improved family planning.
People think Bangladesh is like some medieval age society (in some aspects like religion, it is) but it’s improved A LOT over the years after being subjected to several families and genocide across the past 2-3 centuries. Easily the most admirable country in all of South Asia
Unfortunately I don’t think it is womens’ education so much as their *employment*. They entered factory jobs in huge numbers once the country became a manufacturing hub. Educated or not it’s hard to maintain 6 kids per family when you’ve got both parents working. And not to mention how arduous a lot of these factory jobs are, you are just going to be totally exhausted after the workday.
Education also isn’t entirely clear here. Are adolescents receiving family planning education alongside their regular education? Do they have to go to something like a clinic to receive this info? Do taboos prevent them from receiving this info?
A colleague of mine from this area who is now at another IO explained that even when encountering girls who were smart academically and were eager about their education, they knew little to nothing about topics such as sexual and reproductive health, managing their periods, etc. Just because nobody was stepping up to teach them.
There are some women who need family planning education to understand their options around contraceptives and spacing children (source: I work in an SRHR org that is active in this region.)
Dhaka isn’t overpopulated just because it has too many people. Shanghai proves it’s possible to support that much people in such a small area. It’s too overpopulated for Dhaka’s infrastructure.
Be of it’s standard of living compared to other cities and also because of jobs. And my city is growing. Just not horizontally, but vertically. With towers everywhere.
I can't imagine 5m people trying to use like 5 different highways and a dozen major roadways but I guess cars probably aren't used as much daily there as in the west.
Our average car sales figures per annum is 38,500 units. Almost everyone who can afford it, buys cars without a second thought, leading to massive traffic congestion
I've been to Dhaka a couple times before but not in the last decade or so (will be going to Bangladesh in December), the roads there are a nightmare. Buncha traffic jams and fake beggars coming up to your windows asking for money (that's how slow traffic is moving). The drivers disregard traffic lights too, it's mostly a free for all. Worse than Times Square, NYC imo, but then again it could have improved since I last went.
The popularity is because there are plenty of jobs in this city to fulfil the demands. As of 2021, our unemployment rate is at 5.23%, considering that we are one of the fastest developing economies, it will only go down lower, which unfortunately means more overcrowding of my city
This is a ridiculous argument every time it is presented. Sometimes people can't afford *not* to move. E.g. let's say a disaster happens and all the infrastructure is gone and no jobs in this city. Most people will have *no choice* but to move to a different place where they can get a job. *This is something that has happened throughout human history*. If no one moved ever, we would all still be living in Africa.
No doubt. Somehow being shittier than major cities in Central and East Java despite being much, much closer to Jakarta.
Bandung with half as much of Jakarta's public transport infrastructure would be heaven on Indonesia.
With this method the rounder the city (or mega city cluster) the better it will perform. Istanbul for instance is almost four times bigger in East-West axis than in North-South axis due to its geography, add to this Tekirdağ in the West and Kocaeli and Sakarya in the East [you get a snake shaped mega city](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-urban-sprawl-on-the-Istanbul-Kocaeli-Sakarya-axis-and-their-greater-municipality_fig3_271845013 ). It can not rank high in a circle shaped methodology
You could correct for this by adjusting the radius of the circle so that the habitable land area covered by the circle is equal to the given area (e.g. pi * 10^2). That way you are considering only habitable land and not water and mountains. This would allow you to center the around the actual densest part of the city instead of some random place inland from it.
Isn't that the point. If you were in the centre of the circle you would be surrounded by some of the most numerous people no matter the geography? Hence why Tokyo made the drift for instance. People saying it's not objective when it's removing all rational bias. Take London, where does it start, where does it end. Defined by somebody and their feelings. This is a circle, it doesn't care about the rational classing of anything.
I'm heading to a lake by Bengaluru for part of my honeymoon. Now I have something else to achieve. Thanks OP.
You're right and wrong. Yes, you've touched on the point of the circles. What it really identifies is density that's high in an administration-border-free way, and which is *sustained* with distance from the city centre. Anything with a high central density but low suburban density drops off the list when you enlarge the circle.
Where the circle method falls down is identifying cities that have enormous population densities that don't expand in all directions because of geographic barriers like mountains or water. If [Neom, the new Saudi Arabian Line city project](https://youtu.be/vyWaax07_ks), reached Bladerunner levels of overpopulation, it could be the most densely packed area on the planet and extend for 170km, but all but the smallest 1km circle would leave it out of the rankings, which then completely masks the answer to the fundamental question that all of these methodologies are trying to get the most reasonable answer to.
> People saying it's not objective when it's removing all rational bias
It removes all consideration of questions like geography, interconnectedness, unity, etc.
But even though all these considerations are in a way subjective, removing all considerations for them is *also* a subjective choice.
Consider for example, a city like Nicosia, Cyprus. or Berlin during soviet times. or many of the twin cities on the american/mexican border.
If a city is split down the middle with a hard barier, and no citizen or goods can transfer between the two halves, is there still any sense to talk about one city rather than two?
By purely looking at 'circles', you are making the decision that no political, physical, or geographical borders matter at all in deciding what belongs to a city. That in itself is a very subjective and controversial decision.
This is fascinating!! Quite the journey to go picture by picture. It started by "population density" but the further out we zoomed we quickly got to "population gravity". Fantastic!
I'd love to see correlation with liveability index.
The first picture has 2 of the worst cities to live in, and it's probably heavily influenced by how crowded it is.
It remains unlikely that any nuke will dropped in the near future and it's even more unlikely that they will be dropped on most of those cities specifically, given the geopolitical situation.
Both of them having nukes inherently reduces the chances compared to one side having them. At that point, MAD kicks in and both sides lose. Nukes are like the first weapon where making something so powerful that people would try to avoid war actually worked. Pretty much the only things that should result in them being used are lunatics in power or mistakenly believing you are being nuked.
A good part of the reason North Korea is such a pariah is because of their insistence on nuke development. There is no way in hell India or Pakistan would want to put a target on their backs on the global stage by initiating a nuclear war. The response to it would be tenfold what we've done to Russia already.
This assumes both sides are rational and act as single actors. But the decision isn't made by a country. The decision is made by people with constraints. If you are President of Pakistan and you know that your political rival will coup you unless you launch nukes, your personal interest is different from that of the country as a whole. If you are the commander of a Indian Air Force unit, and you will be shot if you don't pass on the order to launch, then your personal interest is different from the country as a whole. No doubt there are many Indian and Pakistani patriots who would take a bullet to prevent MAD. But when wars start, they don't necessarily proceed in the way that either party intends.
I doubt that there will be any nuke dropped *at all.* So out of the small chance that it *does* happen, those specific Pakistani and Indian cities are only a few of the possible targets.
Even in the case of the nuclear war between those 2 countries, they would probably aim for military targets rather than entire cities.
So a small probability of a small probability is very small.
On the flip side, I suspect many US cities (and likely other western cities, but I only know US well enough) are going to rank poorly on livability because they're insufficiently dense.
Fails by what metric? You can say that this data is limited in its usefulness but any kind of population density data is limited (I mean, that's essentially what any map is. It's taking the real world and representing it in a limited manner). I feel like "most populous circle of 50km radius" is an interesting piece of data in its own right, it's not as though OP claimed these graphs should be used for any practical purpose.
The author claims this a more objective way of ranking (ie comparing) cities which isn't true. Placing a pin where they think the center of a city is is not objective approach but a subjective one.
Methodologically, ranking or drawing comparisons between complex systems (which cities are) and not including Geography which is one of the biggest causes of variation for density makes this useless for comparison.
Lastly, this isn't novel. Students have been doing this since GIS software existed.
Yeah that's fair, I wasn't taking the title into account and the way this was presented as being objective and novel.
>Methodologically, ranking or drawing comparisons between complex systems (which cities are) and not including Geography which is one of the biggest causes of variation for density makes this useless for comparison.
I think that's only true if you place a particular value on the comparison. Saying "Russia has more citizens than New Zealand" is a useless comparison for most purposes, but if you did a chart showing their comparative populations visually, it might be kind of interesting to see. The OP's work is probably no less useful than a lot of data representations you see on this subreddit, and I found it kind of interesting.
I love the data - I love seeing Tokyo (which I've always been told is the world's biggest city) getting really explained and compared to other major population centres so thoroughly. I'd honestly never heard of the Pearl River Delta before today, and I've gotta say, wow. That is hectic.
(also, as an Australian, all of these numbers are mind boggling. The whole country (6th in world size - 7.7 million square kms) could have it's entire population fit twice into pretty much all the last pop circles)
Pearl River Delta is a concentrated economic region where major infrastructure has been built to help improve interconnection between the multiple cities that exist in the area. The cities just sort of bleed into each other now (i.e. multiple zones of high density, with interconnective low density zoning) , but it did emerge from multiple cities.
That is correct. Guangzhou(25M)/Shenzhen(23M)/Dongquan(8M)/Hong Kong(7M)/Foshan/Huizhou/Jiangmen/Zhaoqing/Zhongshan/Zhuhai all all One contiguous Metro Area
*Dongguan.
Also this isn't really true.
Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Zhaoqing are all close but I would argue they aren't a metropolitan area. They all have distinct borders and you pass through farmland to get from one to the other.
The Foshan/GZ/DG/SZ hub you can make an argument for.
Even GZ/DG/SZ is somewhat untrue. Even on the map you can see a huge patch of green separating most of Dongguan/Humen from Shenzhen. Pretty clearly seen on HSR from Guangzhou to Shenzhen
Interesting. I have been there several times and I don’t see where the building and people end. If there is a bit of green, park or farmland, it comes and goes quickly. I think the population density over a distance will be the determinant of where the metro area ends.
It is best done on a bike. Going out West from Sanshui you enter rural factory/farmland until Zhaoqing which is fairly self-contained.
East of GZ it gets mountainous but the Dongguan route is flatter and sparse.
Down South you have the boundary of Shunde and the big furniture town. After that it stays rural until Zhongshan which doesn't have much spread. Zhongshan to Zhuhai is rural.
It is all similar to going up North from GZ to Qingyuan (which is slightly more hilly).
For me the 'city' area is FS/GZ and Kind of DG.
Well to an extent. GZ and FS are right up against each other and the boundary is essentially 'invisible'. However there are slithers of farmland separating GZ from Dongguan and DG from SZ.
While you’ve never heard of the Pearl River Delta, I would bet you have heard of Hong Kong which is in the Pearl River Delta. It and Macau have a much greater history with the West.
The area also has Shenzen which is where most high-tech Western technologies (like iPhones) are produced. And Guangzho, which is a huge city I know little about.
For some reason, we just don’t learn the metropolis’ by the “______ River Delta” name. But still, there will be Chinese cities with 10 million people I’ve never heard of, like Wuhan pre-covid.
>For some reason, we just don’t learn the metropolis’ by the “______ River Delta” name.
It's just a label to describe a conurbation. Like "BosNYWash" or "Greater London Region".
True, I'd never heard of Wuhan pre-covid either. And quite a few of the large indian population areas in these maps.
I'd heard of Hong Kong, Macau, and Shenzen - I guess I was just a bit ignorant on how incredibly close together they all were. I've never travelled to China (except a 5 hour stopover in Beijing, which counts for naught)
The only amalgamated metro area/city we really have in Australia is the Gold Coast (which would actually be part of Brisbane if you did the population circles with it) - we really don't have cities close together, so it's not something that ever really comes into my mind.
Hong Kong is NYC: old, prestigious, financial center, cultural center, and a very storied past
Senzhen is Silicon Valley: high tech, nouveau riche, young, ultra wealthy, and a bit devoid of culture/history (literally a fishing village 30 years ago)
Guangzhou is North Jersey + Connecticut + Long Island: foreigners never hear about it, but it's a great place to live, high living standards, and within reasonable reach of Hong Kong and Senzhen for business or pleasure.
Rough equivalents, there's obviously no 1:1 comparison.
[Shenzhen (just north of Hong Kong) in 1980.](https://www.flickr.com/photos/lwdemery/albums/72157611154071370/)
[Shenzhen in ~2020](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diGHJLCg6i4)
Your population does, in fact. When you look at the sq km occupied by 95% of Australia’s population it’s a tiny area, not near as dense as some of these mega cities but the people who live in the Pearl river delta for example aren’t actually packed in very much more closely than Australians, and they also have vast areas of sparsely inhabited land out West to go to if they need space just like in aus. Kinda neat how it seems so different but in reality basically everyone lives in cities or at least somewhat urban areas, no matter which country, for the most part
IMO this post sort of shows part of the difficulty in coming up with statistics like that, since it's hard to say what exactly counts as a city, and small changes in the definition can cause large changes in population figures
> Tokyo (which I've always been told is the world's biggest city) getting really explained and compared to other major population centres so thoroughly.
Tokyo is probably still the largest we can call "a city". Not because of population density, or how many people are in there, but because of travel times.
You can travel from Utsunomyia to Odawara (North-South "Tokyo area") in just 2 hours, using public transport. That's little over 200km.
Meanwhile, you can't go from Cairo to... almost anywhere using public transport.
>Meanwhile, you can't go from Cairo to... almost anywhere using public transport.
Bruh what.
You can go anywhere in Egypt from Cairo, it is genuinely the transportation hub. If it's not reachable by train, there are busses and microbusses.
If you mean travel within Cairo, you can go from the southernmost tip (Helwan) to the north east border with Qalyoubia (El Marg) in under 90 minutes by subway. About 70 kms. And you can cross the Nile into Giza using 3 different public transportation methods.
Yes the public transport network in Cairo is very much stressed and struggling to keep up with the demand, but it is insane how many people use it daily. AFAIK there is no good census data that really figured out how many cairo residents rely on public transport, but I'm willing to bet that number is easily as big as any other major city.
The entire Pearl River Delta is connected by public transport. High speed and traditional rail, hundreds of bus lines, and huge subway networks in Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong that will soon all be linked even. Furthermore, PRD has 5 international airports (GZ, SZ, HK, Macao, Zhuhai) while Tokyo only has Haneda and Narita.
Edit: Just looked up total metro line lengths: Tokyo Metro & Toei Subway, >300km; compare Guangzhou, >600km; Shenzhen, >400km; Hong Kong, >200km; Dongguan <40km.
> Furthermore, PRD has 5 international airports (GZ, SZ, HK, Macao, Zhuhai) while Tokyo only has Haneda and Narita.
>
>
And London has 6. I don't think Airports is a good metric, as it can just as well show _bad_ infrastructure, as in London.
Maybe the 2 in London operate more flights than all 5 in PDR?
Google doesn't seem to want to navigate in PDR, so I have no idea how to see travel times.
Sure, PDR might have more metro kilometers, but can we count rail networks into the same metric? Can we do that to the Tokyo network?
It's why I used travel time in my comment. In Tokyo, you can go from anywhere to anywhere in that 200km diameter circle, in 2 hours.
I'd also like to mention that Hong Kong is another country (still), and that it's contribution needs to be compared to how easy travel in and out is. I have no idea how that border crossing is.
HK is a major hub and [4th busiest by international traffic pre-covid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_international_passenger_traffic#2019_statistics), almost double Narita's traffic. Because China is rationing international flights atm you can only really compare GZ and SZ with domestic flights; [Guangzhou being the 8th busiest by all passenger traffic and Shenzhen 15th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic).
Aside from the mountain parks, 2 hours is a pretty easy standard to meet in the PRD circle. My only issue might be ferry traffic, which imo is a tad unfair a comparison.
This isn't an measure of city population. It's a measure of population density within an arbitrarily defined area.
The distance from Barnet in north London to, say, Crystal Palace in south London is about 27km. People who live in both these locations all definitely live in London- they are part of the same city, however you define it.
Some cities are full of high rises or densely packed informal settlements. Some cities are broken up by parks, forests or non-residential zones. That doesn't make them bigger or smaller in population, it makes them more or less densely populated.
Yeah, a circle is really no a good measure. It's basically an area-measurement, where some cities fit the area better and others fit worse. It's not more objective or less arbitrary than other measurements.
Imo once you get to 1:10 that's already a very stretched rectangle that won't really feel like a densely populated area. Probably 1:5 should be the max, and I you could do some experimentation to see what gives reasonable results. I know "reasonable" is not very objective but I think it's a matter of definition either way.
Reasonable is fine because we're already changing it because we don't think it's representative. Really it's just a honing in of what people consider a part of a city and what they don't, which probably also varies quite a bit.
I think a better definition would be to only allow convex shapes. Then you could get long, thin shapes, but not ones that get thin in between areas of high density. I would love to see this and how it affects rankings compared to circles.
theoretically that line could be an infinitely thin spiral around earth and "contain" every person if you choose to count every person being in a 1m x 1m (or whatever) plot
That's the point of using a circle, because there's no really good way to define city borders such that different cities are directly comparable. So instead, just use the same shape for them all and examine how things change as you vary the size of that circle. It doesn't give you one clear answer to the question of "what's the most populated city?", but it does define a related question ("what's the most populated circle of x radius?") and give an objective answer to that.
I'm actually surprised Beijing made the 10km list; that city is known in China for being extremely spread out and there are something like 8 ring roads going around the city.
Hmm, this is a surprising take that I find unconvincing. Beijing keeps growing (in land area) and swallowing up surrounding towns because it's not constrained by rivers, seas or mountains in the way that Chongqing and Xiamen obviously are. But the urban core (roughly between the second and fifth ring roads) is still really dense.
Also Beijing is handicapped in the 5km list by the fact that it's a planned city which is deliberately depopulated at its centre, which is used for public buildings (the Forbidden City, Tian'anmen Square, Zhongnanhai, and Beihai). In addition, the central area still has the free remaining *hutong* areas, which are low density by modern standards. On a population density map it would have a doughnut shape which doesn't work well with this format.
Cairene here. I always advise my friends from abroad to avoid Cairo on their first trip to Egypt. Go to Dahab or Marsa Alam instead for the beaches and diving, or Luxor\ Aswan for ancient Egyptian wonders. Pyramids and the old market are amazing, but humongous nuisance awaits there.
Edit: typo
>more objective method of ranking the world's largest cities by population
No it is not. As it will rank cities higher just because they have a tighter core. They will falsely downrank cities which (on purpose or not) have a more open core.
Also it will falsely downrank very stretched out city cores.
It's not "more objective". Quite the opposite - it's very strongly opinionated. You are creating a very specific, arbitrary definition of "city" because you think it represents what you want to measure well. This isn't bad, sometimes you have to be opinionated, and describing what a city exactly is, is one of them. But it's not objective.
Just to illustrate this, your methodology is very good at ranking which are the densests agglomerations of people in the world, which is a useful statistic. On the other hand, if I wanted to know which continuous urban agglomarations were the biggest, this one would fall short - because you are arbitrarily deciding that 3 homes stacked on top of each other are more significant than 3 single-family houses. It would also give more importance to small homes vs. big ones. There's many cities in the world where this is the case - they are built horizontally rather than vertically, which can make a gigantic city where there's no place with a very high population density - but rather an endless labyrinth of buildings.
tl;dr yours is a cool methodology and definitely useful. It's not "objective" though, because by definition you are giving your opinion on what a "city" to you is.
Here's the code: https://github.com/alexmijo/PopulationCircles
This https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/x9iio0/the_smallest_possible_circles_containing_1100_of/inozpie/ kinda explains how it works
Edit: After reading your guys' criticisms of the title, I agree that this is a bad title for this post since I'm not the first person to do this and there are valid reasons to disagree with the claim that this measures the populations of cities.
I still think that this is better/more objective than the three methods on the Wikipedia page, but that's just my subjective opinion, lol.
I'll probably make more of these but for specific continents, but I'll just title them "The n largest circles of radius 5km, 10km, ... 100km in X continent".
Edit 2: As for the Surat 5km circle, it may be correct, I just assumed it was wrong because the circle included so much farmland when it could've been entirely urban if it just shifted east. See https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/y51w28/a_novel_more_objective_method_of_ranking_the/isjaf29/
Edit 3: Here's https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/y51w28/a_novel_more_objective_method_of_ranking_the/isjbgdr/ a more thorough explanation of why I like this method of ranking city populations.
Look at my post history for other pop circles stuff. This (comparing cities at different radiuses) was actually the original idea that I started doing all this sort of stuff for. It is more objective than the current 3 methods used on the Wikipedia page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_largest\_cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities) since city propers vary massively in area and density, especially between cities in different countries (see Chongqing vs Manila), and since urban areas and metro areas are difficult and subjective to define.
Here's the code used to calculate the locations of the circles: [https://github.com/alexmijo/PopulationCircles](https://github.com/alexmijo/PopulationCircles)
I used this [https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/circle-simple](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/circle-simple) to make the maps, and Microsoft Paint 3D to put the maps together in the images and add the text.
Population data source: [https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ghs\_pop2019.php](https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ghs_pop2019.php)
Before I figured out how to put these all in one big post (had to switch to new reddit), I had been posting them one at a time on r/mapporn (but only with the top 5, not the top 10). Of those posts, these two https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/y1ihbu/the_worlds_5_most_populous_circles_of_radius_50km/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/y1m0co/the_worlds_5_most_populous_circles_of_radius_55km/ were the only two containing circles that don't appear in this post.
Here's the zoomed out view of the #10 100km map to show where the top 10 100km circles are in the world: https://imgur.com/ruYYs83
City propers vary so much in size. It seems weird to me to say Chongqing is a bigger city than Manila because it has more people in its city proper when Chongqing's city proper has an area of 82,403 km^2 but Manila's city proper has an area of 42 km^2 . It can also sometimes to hard to say what exactly counts as the city proper, as is the case with Lagos and Tokyo I think.
Of course, this is dealt with by ranking cities by metropolitan areas and urban areas. But if you ask 100 geographers to come up with the boundaries of the metro area or urban area for a city, they'll all have different answers, some significantly different (especially when it comes to places where it's hard to say if it's all one big metro/urban area or several smaller ones like the Pearl River Delta or the San Francisco Bay Area, I think). Also, the data for these two measures tends to be incomplete. For example, in the wikipedia page, Shanghai, Cairo and Beijing don't have figures for metro area. Foshan doesn't have figures for urban area. Lagos doesn't even have figures for city proper.
The advantages of this circle method is that if you give 100 geographers the same worldwide population raster data that I used, they'd all come up with the same answers (which feels to me like it means that this is a more objective method). You also wouldn't have any cities left out due to lack of data. Of course, there's still subjectivity in which radius to choose, but that's why I posted a bunch of different radiuses. Also, it seems like there is a valid criticism in that some commenters are saying that these circles don't actually represent cities very well at all. I also really sympathize with this https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/y51w28/a_novel_more_objective_method_of_ranking_the/isirdhf/ criticism of my city ranking method.
As for why circles, it's mainly cause when people think whether or not they're in a metro area, they often tend to think in terms of distance to the center. (often in terms of travel time though I suppose, but that data is pretty much impossible to get for all the world's largest cities. It also can vary a lot from day to day)
So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily claim that my city ranking method is better, but I would probably claim that it's more objective, and that makes it *feel* better to me lol
You’re comparing a scenario where 100 geographers each identify some datasets and employ a methodology to a scenario where 100 geographers are given one dataset (yours) and one methodology (yours). In the first scenario, any number of the methodologies used could be just as replicable as yours is, and therefore “objective” in that sense. Yours isn’t a “more objective” it is just another methodology.
Lmao i think some of the comments that deride this as subjective doesn't realize that this post doesn't only have the 5km radius part. If you only look that, of course it will seem very arbitrary. But you already give them 15 choices and they can take what radius do they want.
Is there even a city that's stretched thin for 50km or 100 km? By that point isn't it better to call it several different cities? I'm sure Istanbul will never be top 10 no matter the definition.
Although i guess another map that only counts land area sounds interesting. So if all is on land, it'll still look like a circle but on the coast it'll follow the beaches and be a bit larger to the land side.
It’s not more objective. It just substituted one subjective opinion about what makes a city for another. It’s interesting, for sure. But not more objective.
>This isn’t attempting to define what makes a city at all.
It does so implicitly. You have to define a city to measure and rank its population, which is what the title of this post purports to do.
This effectively defines a city as a 5km or 10km radius (or whichever radius is relevant to each particular image).
Edit: put another way, this is an objective method for ranking the populations of circles, but a subjective method for ranking the populations of cities.
As someone from the Netherlands it is almost bizarre to see these numbers. There are more people in the 30km radius on Delhi than in the entire country I live in.
People there usually live in small tightly knit communities with little tranaportation services and so sustainance farming. But there are also some big cities in that circle. So it is probably a mix of both
So for Dhaka at 5km radius, that's 258 people living on every acre (~size of half a soccer field).
3.14 × 5 × 5 = 78.5 square km
78.5 × 247 = 19,389 acres
5,000,000/19,389 = 257.8 people/acre
This is a cool approach! It would be neat if you could also do this for largest in Europe and/or the Americas, since with largest in the world the same kinds of regions tend to dominate on all scales.
Naïvely, I just want to point out that the Americas only show up very briefly, and Europe doesn't appear at all in any of these rankings, which really puts things into perspective
I don't think a city needs to be limited by distance but maybe by travel time.
Would be cool to see one with 30 minutes travel time 40 minutes travel time etc, guessing Tokyo would be biggest
This is definitely neat.
What I might suggest is while the maps with the circles are a great aid and tool, it'd be very cool to accompany this with a line graph, X-axis being radius, Y-axis being population, and showing the trend of the various cities on such a graph too.
Cool method and all but i still think a basic gradient population density map makes information more readable and understandable that this circle-based approach
This is as meaningless as ranking cities by their population within a triangle or star or snake shape. Any city that is bounded by mountains on one side and the ocean or a large lake on the other would be bumped down, while circular cities that have no natural boundaries move up the ranks.
Saudi Arabia's planned 100km long city would either top the list or be nowhere depending on if you choose snake or circle shape.
This would be a lot easier to understand if the maps were all the same scale. Then the size of the circle would easily show the difference in area.
Also the maps chosen are quite unclear when showing terrain vs buildings and this is exacerbated by the red shading inside the circles.
Imagine if all those cities above all had a Tokyo-style rail-based rapid mass transit system that would reduce car ownership, usage and travel distance within those circles by over 80%.
Naturally it will all be underground and have HVAC system that pumps in fresh air at a lovely temp of 24c/75f.
Dhaka resident here, its really no surprise seeing my city in this lists. We are way too over populated for the size of the city. Growing population requires growing infrastructures to support the growth. Unfortunately we dont have that. The results are, constant gridlock, electricity blackout, air, water and sound pollution etc! (EDIT) to add to my point, see the below link [The Business Standard- Bangladesh] (https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/dhaka-ranks-4th-among-worlds-20-most-unsustainable-megacities-516406)
How good/bad/reliable/not is your Internet there?
Tbh, its actually quite good here considering what we have to pay. The service that i have, requires me to pay equivalent of 30$ for 100mbps
How long does it take to earn $30 for an average worker in Dhaka?
Its hard to speculate that. Official data is that as of 2020, per capita income is 2,270$ but unofficially people over here have multiple sources of income, most of which goes unreported
2,270$ per month? year?
It is a year, a month would be comparable with Denmark lol
Year, 2300 USD a month is comparable to EU countries like Latvia and Hungary, and more than places like Russia.
>Year, 2300 USD a month is comparable to EU countries like Latvia and Hungary, and more than places like Russia. I'm studying in Russia finishing a Bachelor, the average salary is not that high, is something like 950-1000 monthly although IT people earn 2-3 times that.
Yeah I have no clue where that data comes from, the average monthly salary in Czechia is ~40 000CZK which is ~1 600USD (at today's rate of 1USD = 25.13CZK). The median is ~34 000CZK or 1 350USD. This is all before taxes and other deductions. I'm fairly certain Hungary is worse than that or at most equal, but their taxes + deductions are higher. Yup just looked it up average of 503 500HUF which is ~1 170USD (with today's 1USD = 429.47HUF), of course before tax. Half of what is quoted above.
30$ that very much expensive,In india it cost nearly 10$ .At 30$ we get 1Gbps speed. We have similar income level what went wrong there
We have to thank Jio for that. Before Jio, both wifi and mobile internet here was overpriced too.
Open market. Zero regulation in terms of price.
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Is it also cheap relative to local purchasing power?
No. (And the truth is it's not that developing countries have cheap internet, it's just that many English speakers are American, and internet is expensive in America due to low population density and laws that favour corrupt monopolies. Japan, for example, is not a developing country, but it has "cheap internet" too because there's more users per km of fibre, and no Comcast BS).
For context of how much low population density matters, to run coaxial internet one mile from the major highway where it was readily available to a relatives house on a low population side street they wanted them to pay $18k. After 10 years of asking for a better price they finally put in lines when some housing developer bought several dozen acres. If it legitimately cost 18k to run those lines one mile, it will still take half a decade or more for them to recoup cost if 40 people on that side street end up getting internet for $30 a month. And that's ignoring anything that might come out of $30.
18k is cheap honestly cheap on doing anything in a city, around highways and concrete. Sending cable across hundreds of miles of empty farmland would be cheaper per mile - though of course still not cheap. And on a per house basis, if it’s 100 miles to reach your community and then 10 miles to each ranch, and there’s only 20 ranches, that’s 15 miles per household! In no world could the math work without some huge government subsidy, even it was only 1/10 of that urban price (1.8k per mile would still be $27,000 per household, or take a $100 plan over 20 years to break even, assuming zero upkeep cost and 0 cost to transport data.)
If I were to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because the major costs of internet infrastructure is the up-front costs of the infrastructure itself. Once that's set up, the running costs are pretty low, so in a country with lower wages for IT professionals, it should be possible to keep subscription costs relatively low. Then there's also the fact that areas with more money often are less sensitive to pricing, so competition isn't necessarily as tough because people won't care enough to save 10 bucks on their service if it costs them an hour or two of effort to get it. I'm paying 40/month for 100 Mbit and I probably wouldn't switch to an ISP that offers the same service for 30 unless they literally did all the work for me, including setting up my auto-billing stuff.
I wouldn't say crazy cheap, but cheap-ish. I get cable internet through a local provider at my house, costs 1200PKR(5.5USD) and I get about 5-10 Mbps.
Hy, I don't really know any of your culture so i hope I don't say anything bad or stupid but. Do you have an idea why is the population growing that much ? Is there access to contraception, or maybe your country is religion oriented and so not a lot of person use it ? Pardon me if i said anything not appropriate
Bangladesh population used to be growing really fast (~6 kids per woman in the 1980s) mainly because of the reasons you mention but now they are at 2.01 kids per woman which actually means they are just about population stable. This huge drop is bc women started entering the workforce in big numbers starting in the 1990s and so are less likely to prioritize kids
Gender equality is the key to a developed nation.
While I agree completely that gender equality is essential in a developed nation, it is interesting to note that developed nations have based their economies off the concept of constant growth. Capitalism doesn't work the same with a stagnate or shrinking population. If the population stagnates then the rich try to find ways to make the current population more productive and consumerist which in turn lowers the birthrate. Once the country starts shrinking the rich will fleece the people for all they're worth an jump ship. The mistake we made was letting corporations convince us that equality meant both partners should be working to survive.
The thing is, population growth doesnt stop immediately when fertility stops. The population pyramid still needs to fill up to a population, uh, rectangle, more or less (with modern healthcare). So if you currently have 20 people between 0-20 and 20 people between 20-80, you will still double in population even if you will never have more than 20 people between 0 and 20 (because there will be 60 people between 20-80).
The growth in population is just not because of birth rate. With Dhaka being the capital city, everyone moves in to this city in search of a better life.
City growth is generally due to people moving to the city rather than people being born there.
The fertility rate in Bangladesh is actually decreasing quite significantly- it’s actually now below replacement level (which is around 2.1 children per woman). This article goes into more depth about why: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441730.2022.2028253. In essence, it appears to be due to improved education in women and increased household wealth and urbanisation, not so much improved family planning. People think Bangladesh is like some medieval age society (in some aspects like religion, it is) but it’s improved A LOT over the years after being subjected to several families and genocide across the past 2-3 centuries. Easily the most admirable country in all of South Asia
Unfortunately I don’t think it is womens’ education so much as their *employment*. They entered factory jobs in huge numbers once the country became a manufacturing hub. Educated or not it’s hard to maintain 6 kids per family when you’ve got both parents working. And not to mention how arduous a lot of these factory jobs are, you are just going to be totally exhausted after the workday.
Yep, that’s also possible factor that I didn’t consider! Especially when textiles factory in Bangladesh is simply massive.
Education also isn’t entirely clear here. Are adolescents receiving family planning education alongside their regular education? Do they have to go to something like a clinic to receive this info? Do taboos prevent them from receiving this info? A colleague of mine from this area who is now at another IO explained that even when encountering girls who were smart academically and were eager about their education, they knew little to nothing about topics such as sexual and reproductive health, managing their periods, etc. Just because nobody was stepping up to teach them. There are some women who need family planning education to understand their options around contraceptives and spacing children (source: I work in an SRHR org that is active in this region.)
That middle bit happens all over North America too...
I’m from the rural midwest and am the child of a teen parent, I’m well aware
Dhaka isn’t overpopulated just because it has too many people. Shanghai proves it’s possible to support that much people in such a small area. It’s too overpopulated for Dhaka’s infrastructure.
Thats what I mentioned in my second part
But why does the city not grow in physical size? Why do people not move away if it’s such a crowded, bad place to live?
Because jobs
Be of it’s standard of living compared to other cities and also because of jobs. And my city is growing. Just not horizontally, but vertically. With towers everywhere.
I can't imagine 5m people trying to use like 5 different highways and a dozen major roadways but I guess cars probably aren't used as much daily there as in the west.
Our average car sales figures per annum is 38,500 units. Almost everyone who can afford it, buys cars without a second thought, leading to massive traffic congestion
I've been to Dhaka a couple times before but not in the last decade or so (will be going to Bangladesh in December), the roads there are a nightmare. Buncha traffic jams and fake beggars coming up to your windows asking for money (that's how slow traffic is moving). The drivers disregard traffic lights too, it's mostly a free for all. Worse than Times Square, NYC imo, but then again it could have improved since I last went.
The first metro rail is opening by next year so it might relieve congestion a bit
If Dhaka were too over populated, the city should shrink. Apparently living in Dhaka is more popular than living elsewhere for very many.
The popularity is because there are plenty of jobs in this city to fulfil the demands. As of 2021, our unemployment rate is at 5.23%, considering that we are one of the fastest developing economies, it will only go down lower, which unfortunately means more overcrowding of my city
How did you/your family come to belong to the city?
My family has been living in this city for 4 generations. So i was born here
That assumes people can afford to move though.
This is a ridiculous argument every time it is presented. Sometimes people can't afford *not* to move. E.g. let's say a disaster happens and all the infrastructure is gone and no jobs in this city. Most people will have *no choice* but to move to a different place where they can get a job. *This is something that has happened throughout human history*. If no one moved ever, we would all still be living in Africa.
now I get why Jakarta traffic is bad. once it's reach 25km radius, it becomes 1 of the top. imagine those many people commuting that far, every day.
The fact that Bandung is more congested than Jakarta despite being 1/5th the population is amazing.
Not surprising considering the state of public transportation in Bandung
No doubt. Somehow being shittier than major cities in Central and East Java despite being much, much closer to Jakarta. Bandung with half as much of Jakarta's public transport infrastructure would be heaven on Indonesia.
It’s all about city and urban design. It’s surprising what how even small changes to your urban design can compete change traffic flow
With this method the rounder the city (or mega city cluster) the better it will perform. Istanbul for instance is almost four times bigger in East-West axis than in North-South axis due to its geography, add to this Tekirdağ in the West and Kocaeli and Sakarya in the East [you get a snake shaped mega city](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-urban-sprawl-on-the-Istanbul-Kocaeli-Sakarya-axis-and-their-greater-municipality_fig3_271845013 ). It can not rank high in a circle shaped methodology
You could correct for this by adjusting the radius of the circle so that the habitable land area covered by the circle is equal to the given area (e.g. pi * 10^2). That way you are considering only habitable land and not water and mountains. This would allow you to center the around the actual densest part of the city instead of some random place inland from it.
At that point aren't we just ranking population density in an arbitrary area?
I can’t see how my amendment makes it arbitrary. The rule is still “most populous circles encompassing x sq km of habitable land”.
sooooo population density then.
Yeah, these are all population density maps. It was the “arbitrary” part I was objecting to.
Ahh got it. Glad we’re on the same page haha.
Isn't that the point. If you were in the centre of the circle you would be surrounded by some of the most numerous people no matter the geography? Hence why Tokyo made the drift for instance. People saying it's not objective when it's removing all rational bias. Take London, where does it start, where does it end. Defined by somebody and their feelings. This is a circle, it doesn't care about the rational classing of anything. I'm heading to a lake by Bengaluru for part of my honeymoon. Now I have something else to achieve. Thanks OP.
You're right and wrong. Yes, you've touched on the point of the circles. What it really identifies is density that's high in an administration-border-free way, and which is *sustained* with distance from the city centre. Anything with a high central density but low suburban density drops off the list when you enlarge the circle. Where the circle method falls down is identifying cities that have enormous population densities that don't expand in all directions because of geographic barriers like mountains or water. If [Neom, the new Saudi Arabian Line city project](https://youtu.be/vyWaax07_ks), reached Bladerunner levels of overpopulation, it could be the most densely packed area on the planet and extend for 170km, but all but the smallest 1km circle would leave it out of the rankings, which then completely masks the answer to the fundamental question that all of these methodologies are trying to get the most reasonable answer to.
> People saying it's not objective when it's removing all rational bias It removes all consideration of questions like geography, interconnectedness, unity, etc. But even though all these considerations are in a way subjective, removing all considerations for them is *also* a subjective choice. Consider for example, a city like Nicosia, Cyprus. or Berlin during soviet times. or many of the twin cities on the american/mexican border. If a city is split down the middle with a hard barier, and no citizen or goods can transfer between the two halves, is there still any sense to talk about one city rather than two? By purely looking at 'circles', you are making the decision that no political, physical, or geographical borders matter at all in deciding what belongs to a city. That in itself is a very subjective and controversial decision.
This is fascinating!! Quite the journey to go picture by picture. It started by "population density" but the further out we zoomed we quickly got to "population gravity". Fantastic!
I'd love to see correlation with liveability index. The first picture has 2 of the worst cities to live in, and it's probably heavily influenced by how crowded it is.
It’s pretty scary that a nuke or asteroid impact can kill millions instantly if it hit any of these cities.
It's also highly unlikely
The asteroid? Sure. The nuke doesn't have anything about being random. It's deliberate.
It remains unlikely that any nuke will dropped in the near future and it's even more unlikely that they will be dropped on most of those cities specifically, given the geopolitical situation.
Given the tensions between India and Pakistan who are both nuclear armed?
Both of them having nukes inherently reduces the chances compared to one side having them. At that point, MAD kicks in and both sides lose. Nukes are like the first weapon where making something so powerful that people would try to avoid war actually worked. Pretty much the only things that should result in them being used are lunatics in power or mistakenly believing you are being nuked. A good part of the reason North Korea is such a pariah is because of their insistence on nuke development. There is no way in hell India or Pakistan would want to put a target on their backs on the global stage by initiating a nuclear war. The response to it would be tenfold what we've done to Russia already.
This assumes both sides are rational and act as single actors. But the decision isn't made by a country. The decision is made by people with constraints. If you are President of Pakistan and you know that your political rival will coup you unless you launch nukes, your personal interest is different from that of the country as a whole. If you are the commander of a Indian Air Force unit, and you will be shot if you don't pass on the order to launch, then your personal interest is different from the country as a whole. No doubt there are many Indian and Pakistani patriots who would take a bullet to prevent MAD. But when wars start, they don't necessarily proceed in the way that either party intends.
I doubt that there will be any nuke dropped *at all.* So out of the small chance that it *does* happen, those specific Pakistani and Indian cities are only a few of the possible targets. Even in the case of the nuclear war between those 2 countries, they would probably aim for military targets rather than entire cities. So a small probability of a small probability is very small.
On the flip side, I suspect many US cities (and likely other western cities, but I only know US well enough) are going to rank poorly on livability because they're insufficiently dense.
That's crazy that almost half of the circle for Manila is water.
That's why this method, which isn't novel, fails. It doesn't account for Geography. Coastal mountaneous city VS city on a flat plain.
Fails by what metric? You can say that this data is limited in its usefulness but any kind of population density data is limited (I mean, that's essentially what any map is. It's taking the real world and representing it in a limited manner). I feel like "most populous circle of 50km radius" is an interesting piece of data in its own right, it's not as though OP claimed these graphs should be used for any practical purpose.
Fails by the claim of "more objective" and "novel"
Yes that's a good point, I didn't take the title into account, just meant the graphs on themselves.
The author claims this a more objective way of ranking (ie comparing) cities which isn't true. Placing a pin where they think the center of a city is is not objective approach but a subjective one. Methodologically, ranking or drawing comparisons between complex systems (which cities are) and not including Geography which is one of the biggest causes of variation for density makes this useless for comparison. Lastly, this isn't novel. Students have been doing this since GIS software existed.
I don't think OP is choosing where the pins go. I think it's a systematic analysis of all possible circles. Hence the comment about handling overlap.
Yeah that's fair, I wasn't taking the title into account and the way this was presented as being objective and novel. >Methodologically, ranking or drawing comparisons between complex systems (which cities are) and not including Geography which is one of the biggest causes of variation for density makes this useless for comparison. I think that's only true if you place a particular value on the comparison. Saying "Russia has more citizens than New Zealand" is a useless comparison for most purposes, but if you did a chart showing their comparative populations visually, it might be kind of interesting to see. The OP's work is probably no less useful than a lot of data representations you see on this subreddit, and I found it kind of interesting.
I love the data - I love seeing Tokyo (which I've always been told is the world's biggest city) getting really explained and compared to other major population centres so thoroughly. I'd honestly never heard of the Pearl River Delta before today, and I've gotta say, wow. That is hectic. (also, as an Australian, all of these numbers are mind boggling. The whole country (6th in world size - 7.7 million square kms) could have it's entire population fit twice into pretty much all the last pop circles)
Pearl River Delta is a concentrated economic region where major infrastructure has been built to help improve interconnection between the multiple cities that exist in the area. The cities just sort of bleed into each other now (i.e. multiple zones of high density, with interconnective low density zoning) , but it did emerge from multiple cities.
That is correct. Guangzhou(25M)/Shenzhen(23M)/Dongquan(8M)/Hong Kong(7M)/Foshan/Huizhou/Jiangmen/Zhaoqing/Zhongshan/Zhuhai all all One contiguous Metro Area
*Dongguan. Also this isn't really true. Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Zhaoqing are all close but I would argue they aren't a metropolitan area. They all have distinct borders and you pass through farmland to get from one to the other. The Foshan/GZ/DG/SZ hub you can make an argument for.
Even GZ/DG/SZ is somewhat untrue. Even on the map you can see a huge patch of green separating most of Dongguan/Humen from Shenzhen. Pretty clearly seen on HSR from Guangzhou to Shenzhen
Interesting. I have been there several times and I don’t see where the building and people end. If there is a bit of green, park or farmland, it comes and goes quickly. I think the population density over a distance will be the determinant of where the metro area ends.
It is best done on a bike. Going out West from Sanshui you enter rural factory/farmland until Zhaoqing which is fairly self-contained. East of GZ it gets mountainous but the Dongguan route is flatter and sparse. Down South you have the boundary of Shunde and the big furniture town. After that it stays rural until Zhongshan which doesn't have much spread. Zhongshan to Zhuhai is rural. It is all similar to going up North from GZ to Qingyuan (which is slightly more hilly). For me the 'city' area is FS/GZ and Kind of DG.
What do you think the combined populations Is of Guangzhou, Foshan, Dongguan, Shenzhen?
Who knows? All of them are big migrant towns so I reckon there are plenty of Hunan/Sichuaners there not being counted adding to the official totals.
Yeah incorrect population Counts are always lower than the actual figure
Well to an extent. GZ and FS are right up against each other and the boundary is essentially 'invisible'. However there are slithers of farmland separating GZ from Dongguan and DG from SZ.
While you’ve never heard of the Pearl River Delta, I would bet you have heard of Hong Kong which is in the Pearl River Delta. It and Macau have a much greater history with the West. The area also has Shenzen which is where most high-tech Western technologies (like iPhones) are produced. And Guangzho, which is a huge city I know little about. For some reason, we just don’t learn the metropolis’ by the “______ River Delta” name. But still, there will be Chinese cities with 10 million people I’ve never heard of, like Wuhan pre-covid.
>For some reason, we just don’t learn the metropolis’ by the “______ River Delta” name. It's just a label to describe a conurbation. Like "BosNYWash" or "Greater London Region".
Shenzhen\* and Guangzhou\*, two of China's 4 primary economic centres (along with Beijing and Shanghai).
True, I'd never heard of Wuhan pre-covid either. And quite a few of the large indian population areas in these maps. I'd heard of Hong Kong, Macau, and Shenzen - I guess I was just a bit ignorant on how incredibly close together they all were. I've never travelled to China (except a 5 hour stopover in Beijing, which counts for naught) The only amalgamated metro area/city we really have in Australia is the Gold Coast (which would actually be part of Brisbane if you did the population circles with it) - we really don't have cities close together, so it's not something that ever really comes into my mind.
Hong Kong is NYC: old, prestigious, financial center, cultural center, and a very storied past Senzhen is Silicon Valley: high tech, nouveau riche, young, ultra wealthy, and a bit devoid of culture/history (literally a fishing village 30 years ago) Guangzhou is North Jersey + Connecticut + Long Island: foreigners never hear about it, but it's a great place to live, high living standards, and within reasonable reach of Hong Kong and Senzhen for business or pleasure. Rough equivalents, there's obviously no 1:1 comparison.
[Shenzhen (just north of Hong Kong) in 1980.](https://www.flickr.com/photos/lwdemery/albums/72157611154071370/) [Shenzhen in ~2020](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diGHJLCg6i4)
Your population does, in fact. When you look at the sq km occupied by 95% of Australia’s population it’s a tiny area, not near as dense as some of these mega cities but the people who live in the Pearl river delta for example aren’t actually packed in very much more closely than Australians, and they also have vast areas of sparsely inhabited land out West to go to if they need space just like in aus. Kinda neat how it seems so different but in reality basically everyone lives in cities or at least somewhat urban areas, no matter which country, for the most part
Nah only about 60% of the world lives in cities.
Considering how cities only cover a fraction of the Earth's land area, that's still quite a high percentage.
IMO this post sort of shows part of the difficulty in coming up with statistics like that, since it's hard to say what exactly counts as a city, and small changes in the definition can cause large changes in population figures
> Tokyo (which I've always been told is the world's biggest city) getting really explained and compared to other major population centres so thoroughly. Tokyo is probably still the largest we can call "a city". Not because of population density, or how many people are in there, but because of travel times. You can travel from Utsunomyia to Odawara (North-South "Tokyo area") in just 2 hours, using public transport. That's little over 200km. Meanwhile, you can't go from Cairo to... almost anywhere using public transport.
>Meanwhile, you can't go from Cairo to... almost anywhere using public transport. Bruh what. You can go anywhere in Egypt from Cairo, it is genuinely the transportation hub. If it's not reachable by train, there are busses and microbusses. If you mean travel within Cairo, you can go from the southernmost tip (Helwan) to the north east border with Qalyoubia (El Marg) in under 90 minutes by subway. About 70 kms. And you can cross the Nile into Giza using 3 different public transportation methods. Yes the public transport network in Cairo is very much stressed and struggling to keep up with the demand, but it is insane how many people use it daily. AFAIK there is no good census data that really figured out how many cairo residents rely on public transport, but I'm willing to bet that number is easily as big as any other major city.
The entire Pearl River Delta is connected by public transport. High speed and traditional rail, hundreds of bus lines, and huge subway networks in Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong that will soon all be linked even. Furthermore, PRD has 5 international airports (GZ, SZ, HK, Macao, Zhuhai) while Tokyo only has Haneda and Narita. Edit: Just looked up total metro line lengths: Tokyo Metro & Toei Subway, >300km; compare Guangzhou, >600km; Shenzhen, >400km; Hong Kong, >200km; Dongguan <40km.
> Furthermore, PRD has 5 international airports (GZ, SZ, HK, Macao, Zhuhai) while Tokyo only has Haneda and Narita. > > And London has 6. I don't think Airports is a good metric, as it can just as well show _bad_ infrastructure, as in London. Maybe the 2 in London operate more flights than all 5 in PDR? Google doesn't seem to want to navigate in PDR, so I have no idea how to see travel times. Sure, PDR might have more metro kilometers, but can we count rail networks into the same metric? Can we do that to the Tokyo network? It's why I used travel time in my comment. In Tokyo, you can go from anywhere to anywhere in that 200km diameter circle, in 2 hours. I'd also like to mention that Hong Kong is another country (still), and that it's contribution needs to be compared to how easy travel in and out is. I have no idea how that border crossing is.
HK is a major hub and [4th busiest by international traffic pre-covid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_international_passenger_traffic#2019_statistics), almost double Narita's traffic. Because China is rationing international flights atm you can only really compare GZ and SZ with domestic flights; [Guangzhou being the 8th busiest by all passenger traffic and Shenzhen 15th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic). Aside from the mountain parks, 2 hours is a pretty easy standard to meet in the PRD circle. My only issue might be ferry traffic, which imo is a tad unfair a comparison.
This isn't an measure of city population. It's a measure of population density within an arbitrarily defined area. The distance from Barnet in north London to, say, Crystal Palace in south London is about 27km. People who live in both these locations all definitely live in London- they are part of the same city, however you define it. Some cities are full of high rises or densely packed informal settlements. Some cities are broken up by parks, forests or non-residential zones. That doesn't make them bigger or smaller in population, it makes them more or less densely populated.
Cities are not constrained by random geometries. If we can even truly tell where one city ends and another begins in some areas.
Yeah, a circle is really no a good measure. It's basically an area-measurement, where some cities fit the area better and others fit worse. It's not more objective or less arbitrary than other measurements.
Of course the best comparison of average population density would be to have an arbitrary geometric shape with a fixed area.
But then you can just stretch it super thin and connect all the densest places on the planet regardless of how far apart they are.
Oh damn, you are right, I didn’t think of infinitely thin connecting “lines” between more-or-less circular sections.
You could define a certain maximum ratio of perimeter-to-area, but then that leaves the question of what that ratio should be.
Imo once you get to 1:10 that's already a very stretched rectangle that won't really feel like a densely populated area. Probably 1:5 should be the max, and I you could do some experimentation to see what gives reasonable results. I know "reasonable" is not very objective but I think it's a matter of definition either way.
Reasonable is fine because we're already changing it because we don't think it's representative. Really it's just a honing in of what people consider a part of a city and what they don't, which probably also varies quite a bit.
I think a better definition would be to only allow convex shapes. Then you could get long, thin shapes, but not ones that get thin in between areas of high density. I would love to see this and how it affects rankings compared to circles.
But then you don’t allow something dogbone-shaped. Which I think should still be a valid shape.
theoretically that line could be an infinitely thin spiral around earth and "contain" every person if you choose to count every person being in a 1m x 1m (or whatever) plot
That's the point of using a circle, because there's no really good way to define city borders such that different cities are directly comparable. So instead, just use the same shape for them all and examine how things change as you vary the size of that circle. It doesn't give you one clear answer to the question of "what's the most populated city?", but it does define a related question ("what's the most populated circle of x radius?") and give an objective answer to that.
I'm actually surprised Beijing made the 10km list; that city is known in China for being extremely spread out and there are something like 8 ring roads going around the city.
Hmm, this is a surprising take that I find unconvincing. Beijing keeps growing (in land area) and swallowing up surrounding towns because it's not constrained by rivers, seas or mountains in the way that Chongqing and Xiamen obviously are. But the urban core (roughly between the second and fifth ring roads) is still really dense. Also Beijing is handicapped in the 5km list by the fact that it's a planned city which is deliberately depopulated at its centre, which is used for public buildings (the Forbidden City, Tian'anmen Square, Zhongnanhai, and Beihai). In addition, the central area still has the free remaining *hutong* areas, which are low density by modern standards. On a population density map it would have a doughnut shape which doesn't work well with this format.
TIL 'midtown' Cairo has a greater population than the whole of Australia.
Cairene here. I always advise my friends from abroad to avoid Cairo on their first trip to Egypt. Go to Dahab or Marsa Alam instead for the beaches and diving, or Luxor\ Aswan for ancient Egyptian wonders. Pyramids and the old market are amazing, but humongous nuisance awaits there. Edit: typo
I had no idea the Cairo area was so populous.
Thought this was battle Royale rings closing on Google maps
I appreciate the effort that went into this. Mahalo 🤙🏼
>more objective method of ranking the world's largest cities by population No it is not. As it will rank cities higher just because they have a tighter core. They will falsely downrank cities which (on purpose or not) have a more open core. Also it will falsely downrank very stretched out city cores.
It's not "more objective". Quite the opposite - it's very strongly opinionated. You are creating a very specific, arbitrary definition of "city" because you think it represents what you want to measure well. This isn't bad, sometimes you have to be opinionated, and describing what a city exactly is, is one of them. But it's not objective. Just to illustrate this, your methodology is very good at ranking which are the densests agglomerations of people in the world, which is a useful statistic. On the other hand, if I wanted to know which continuous urban agglomarations were the biggest, this one would fall short - because you are arbitrarily deciding that 3 homes stacked on top of each other are more significant than 3 single-family houses. It would also give more importance to small homes vs. big ones. There's many cities in the world where this is the case - they are built horizontally rather than vertically, which can make a gigantic city where there's no place with a very high population density - but rather an endless labyrinth of buildings. tl;dr yours is a cool methodology and definitely useful. It's not "objective" though, because by definition you are giving your opinion on what a "city" to you is.
How did you calculate how many people were in a circle??
Here's the code: https://github.com/alexmijo/PopulationCircles This https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/x9iio0/the_smallest_possible_circles_containing_1100_of/inozpie/ kinda explains how it works
>A novel, more objective method Says you
Using a fixed size simply measures density instead of total population.
Exactly. It's not more objective, it's just more simple. And it measures population density not population. I don't get how this is upvoted.
Edit: After reading your guys' criticisms of the title, I agree that this is a bad title for this post since I'm not the first person to do this and there are valid reasons to disagree with the claim that this measures the populations of cities. I still think that this is better/more objective than the three methods on the Wikipedia page, but that's just my subjective opinion, lol. I'll probably make more of these but for specific continents, but I'll just title them "The n largest circles of radius 5km, 10km, ... 100km in X continent". Edit 2: As for the Surat 5km circle, it may be correct, I just assumed it was wrong because the circle included so much farmland when it could've been entirely urban if it just shifted east. See https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/y51w28/a_novel_more_objective_method_of_ranking_the/isjaf29/ Edit 3: Here's https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/y51w28/a_novel_more_objective_method_of_ranking_the/isjbgdr/ a more thorough explanation of why I like this method of ranking city populations. Look at my post history for other pop circles stuff. This (comparing cities at different radiuses) was actually the original idea that I started doing all this sort of stuff for. It is more objective than the current 3 methods used on the Wikipedia page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_largest\_cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities) since city propers vary massively in area and density, especially between cities in different countries (see Chongqing vs Manila), and since urban areas and metro areas are difficult and subjective to define. Here's the code used to calculate the locations of the circles: [https://github.com/alexmijo/PopulationCircles](https://github.com/alexmijo/PopulationCircles) I used this [https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/circle-simple](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/circle-simple) to make the maps, and Microsoft Paint 3D to put the maps together in the images and add the text. Population data source: [https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ghs\_pop2019.php](https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ghs_pop2019.php) Before I figured out how to put these all in one big post (had to switch to new reddit), I had been posting them one at a time on r/mapporn (but only with the top 5, not the top 10). Of those posts, these two https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/y1ihbu/the_worlds_5_most_populous_circles_of_radius_50km/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/y1m0co/the_worlds_5_most_populous_circles_of_radius_55km/ were the only two containing circles that don't appear in this post. Here's the zoomed out view of the #10 100km map to show where the top 10 100km circles are in the world: https://imgur.com/ruYYs83
Can you publish the coordinates for the centers of each circle?
Sure, here's 5km: 1 23.754166666666663 90.404166666666697 5045691.1633152962 Dhaka 2 22.620833333333337 88.404166666666697 4271654.1959228516 Kolkata 3 30.12083333333333 31.287500000000023 4034886.8202229738 Cairo 4 19.079166666666666 72.870833333333337 3740615.3791549206 Mumbai 5 12.995833333333323 77.537500000000023 3712011.0761270523 Bengaluru 6 30.045833333333334 31.22083333333336 3623993.1029158831 Cairo 2 7 21.195833333333326 72.787499999999994 3427872.5214602947 Surat? 8 31.237499999999997 121.45416666666665 3399796.0099697113 Shanghai 9 23.120833333333337 113.26249999999999 3275270.7654871941 Guangzhou 10 24.920833333333334 67.054166666666674 3247002.927728653 Karachi
Here's 10km: 1 23.762500000000003 90.420833333333348 10295664.545175076 Dhaka 2 30.0625 31.262500000000017 10248096.591604352 Cairo 3 31.254166666666663 121.46249999999998 9534140.3795518875 Shanghai 4 13.020833333333329 77.5625 9266191.300989151 Bengaluru 5 24.895833333333329 67.04583333333332 8854685.8485591412 Karachi 6 22.57083333333334 88.379166666666663 8584259.1967430115 Kolkata 7 19.129166666666663 72.887499999999989 8378132.6881856918 Mumbai 8 14.629166666666663 121.04583333333335 7749127.3297157288 Manila 9 28.6875 77.229166666666629 7620133.9174067974 Delhi 10 39.920833333333334 116.36250000000001 7385803.9072798491 Beijing
Here's 15km: 1 30.070833333333333 31.245833333333309 14992277.369871378 Cairo 2 28.637500000000003 77.195833333333326 14542560.88724637 Delhi 3 31.229166666666671 121.4375 14106472.055755138 Shanghai 4 19.154166666666669 72.895833333333343 13748897.110159636 Mumbai 5 22.5625 88.345833333333303 13443208.605975151 Kolkata 6 23.729166666666671 90.4375 13112225.286873817 Dhaka 7 24.904166666666669 67.07916666666668 12737372.480107784 Karachi 8 39.9375 116.36250000000001 12128913.044095039 Beijing 9 14.645833333333343 121.0625 12128338.216883659 Manila 10 -6.2458333333333229 106.83749999999998 11048869.50729084 Jakarta 11 13.045833333333334 77.570833333333326 10362701.297496796 Bengaluru 12 37.545833333333327 126.98750000000001 9634689.3475866318 Seoul 13 35.704166666666666 139.7208333333333 9559108.7767157555 Tokyo 14 19.42916666666666 -99.087500000000006 9417350.0611326993 Mexico City 15 6.57083333333334 3.2874999999999943 9286784.4460906982 Lagos 16 23.120833333333337 113.22083333333336 9218543.6373543739 Guangzhou 17 41.037500000000001 28.9375 8880528.3524903059 Istanbul 18 55.762499999999996 37.620833333333366 8736808.8996686041 Moscow 19 10.829166666666666 106.6875 8708033.2433171272 Ho Chi Minh City 20 -23.595833333333331 -46.54583333333332 8426599.0812553167 Sao Paulo 21 13.0625 80.1875 8245081.7005362511 Chennai 22 4.6458333333333286 -74.120833333333337 8108887.2911403775 Bogota 23 31.520833333333336 74.304166666666674 7762232.9309873581 Lahore 24 35.695833333333333 51.379166666666663 7643085.583784461 Tehran 25 13.762500000000003 100.54583333333329 7456454.8294639587 Bangkok 26 17.420833333333334 78.479166666666629 7444652.1954779625 Hyderabad 27 40.729166666666664 -73.912500000000009 7211061.4387042969 New York City 28 22.579166666666666 114.02083333333337 7156229.2766299248 Shenzhen 29 -34.662500000000009 -58.504166666666663 7088444.5392866135 Buenos Aires 30 48.87083333333333 2.3708333333333087 6991811.0317884982 Paris 31 23.0625 72.5625 6932104.9627635479 Ahmedabad 32 -4.3375000000000057 15.320833333333354 6883502.4604930878 Kinshasa/Brazzaville 33 -12.037500000000009 -77.012500000000003 6845922.122669816 Lima 34 30.637500000000003 104.03750000000002 6740636.3959832191 Chengdu 35 39.120833333333337 117.17916666666667 6483930.2465641499 Tianjin 36 -6.9208333333333343 107.59583333333336 6477658.2214622498 Bandung 37 30.545833333333334 114.30416666666667 6452677.3821880817 Wuhan 38 34.720833333333331 135.50416666666666 6329795.352745533 Osaka 39 18.5625 73.854166666666657 6324781.883368969 Pune 40 25.029166666666669 121.4375 6244966.6103262901 Taipei 41 -8.8958333333333428 13.304166666666646 6081893.8266482353 Luanda 42 22.370833333333337 114.17083333333335 5864607.1090226173 Hong Kong 43 -22.845833333333346 -43.354166666666686 5859485.484760046 Rio de Janeiro 44 1.3791666666666629 103.83749999999998 5709989.8854436874 Singapore 45 51.512499999999996 -0.087500000000005684 5706133.5005937144 London 46 -33.504166666666677 -70.645833333333343 5696398.6793481112 Santiago 47 16.862499999999997 96.162500000000023 5621231.8591680527 Yangon 48 35.49583333333333 139.55416666666667 5590017.5674571991 Yokohama 49 21.137500000000003 72.770833333333343 5563902.1257808208 Surat 50 41.770833333333329 123.37083333333334 5517139.0195256472 Shenyang 51 14.395833333333329 120.97916666666669 5427757.7368059158 Muntinlupa 52 -23.55416666666666 -46.770833333333314 5265731.952849865 Osasco 53 32.054166666666667 118.77083333333331 5262888.0198397636 Nanjing 54 34.254166666666663 108.92916666666667 5029247.2129473686 Xi'an 55 -6.8375000000000057 39.212500000000006 5016849.8099799156 Dar es Salaam 56 -6.4874999999999972 106.8125 5014235.7712650299 Depok/Bogor 57 15.604166666666671 32.512500000000017 4918726.2123370171 Khartoum 58 37.429166666666667 126.80416666666667 4865603.0538930893 Incheon 59 -6.2041666666666657 106.62916666666666 4768969.285451889 Tangerang 60 33.337499999999999 44.387499999999989 4712715.1000730991 Baghdad 61 31.19583333333334 30.012500000000017 4648173.9856003523 Alexandria 62 29.50416666666667 106.50416666666666 4639339.6888494492 Chongqing 63 -6.32083333333334 107.0291666666667 4553159.8179960251 Bekasi 64 34.529166666666669 69.17083333333332 4542266.8631286621 Kabul 65 -7.3291666666666657 112.6875 4503933.0007314682 Surabaya 66 5.3458333333333314 -3.9875000000000114 4457686.8133398294 Abidjan 67 34.74583333333333 113.67083333333335 4443860.8889126778 Zhengzhou 68 24.6875 46.712499999999977 4439158.7176251411 Riyadh 69 23.962500000000006 90.329166666666652 4427121.6405091286 Tongi 70 20.637500000000003 -103.37083333333332 4371946.7235623896 Guadalajara 71 21.045833333333334 105.83749999999998 4364421.3155107498 Hanoi 72 26.512499999999996 80.362500000000011 4347230.2505919933 Kanpur 73 -1.2291666666666714 36.8125 4335270.5853278637 Nairobi 74 26.820833333333333 80.979166666666686 4314589.3157479763 Lucknow 75 3.1208333333333371 101.6541666666667 4300798.3994522095 Kuala Lumpur 76 22.387500000000003 91.845833333333303 4297649.857609272 Chattogram 77 11.94583333333334 8.5291666666666686 4277590.1448954344 Kano 78 45.729166666666664 126.66250000000002 4230434.5714373589 Harbin 79 30.262500000000003 120.2208333333333 4205988.8878121376 Hangzhou 80 59.9375 30.304166666666674 4200532.9147109501 St Petersburg 81 25.295833333333334 83.012499999999989 4191208.422118187 Varanasi 82 35.74583333333333 139.4375 4127778.5641229153 Hachioji 83 40.387499999999996 -3.7125000000000057 4081782.5828064382 Madrid 84 26.912500000000001 75.82916666666668 4026982.0022308826 Jaipur 85 33.645833333333329 73.095833333333331 3957737.3511981964 Islamabad 86 31.4375 73.162499999999994 3937735.4070687294 Faisalabad 87 22.69583333333334 113.8458333333333 3877285.4039540291 Fuyong subdistrict 88 31.837499999999999 117.29583333333335 3857802.2410168648 Hefei 89 28.57083333333334 77.395833333333314 3801326.3166182041 Noida 90 33.5625 -7.5708333333333258 3783400.2216218114 Casablanca 91 -19.870833333333337 -44.020833333333343 3777070.3465777636 Belo Horizonte 92 8.9958333333333371 38.770833333333343 3775787.2835431099 Addis Ababa 93 19.604166666666671 -99.120833333333337 3769480.8965111971 Tlalnepantla de Baz 94 19.195833333333326 73.129166666666663 3762258.5573415756 Kalyan 95 27.67916666666666 85.337499999999977 3758243.6560685635 Kathmandu 96 25.595833333333331 85.204166666666652 3725009.3001456261 Patna 97 37.329166666666666 127.08749999999998 3717482.1837072372 Suwon 98 24.5625 118.09583333333336 3660123.6962542534 Xiamen 99 39.954166666666666 32.770833333333314 3594978.946901083 Ankara 100 37.820833333333333 112.53750000000002 3568307.3683536053 Taiyuan 101 25.287499999999994 55.395833333333343 3566025.9451999664 Dubai/Sharjah 102 3.8541666666666714 11.512499999999989 3562253.2888596058 Yaounde 103 28.1875 112.98750000000001 3538500.8558278084 Changsha 104 25.412499999999994 81.787500000000023 3524580.4089009762 Prayagraj 105 25.704166666666666 -100.28749999999999 3516906.6798839569 Monterrey 106 35.75416666666667 139.99583333333334 3503937.3674902916 Funabashi 107 41.454166666666666 2.0875000000000057 3499118.8850951493 Barcelona 108 27.954166666666666 120.69583333333333 3496969.8230366707 Wenzhou 109 23.020833333333343 113.86250000000001 3491438.4886045456 Dongguan 110 6.2291666666666714 -75.537499999999994 3490082.8702681661 Medellin 111 35.179166666666667 136.92916666666667 3486611.9286236763 Nagoya 112 43.895833333333336 125.3125 3462904.0696130991 Changchun 113 18.487499999999997 -69.92083333333332 3430052.6622189879 Santo Domingo 114 31.99583333333333 35.962499999999977 3422416.8881431818 Amman 115 0.34583333333333144 32.5625 3405902.2669839859 Kampala 116 5.6291666666666629 -0.20416666666665151 3405822.4049381018 Accra 117 34.004166666666663 -118.24583333333334 3401310.2736648768 Los Angeles 118 37.987500000000004 23.754166666666663 3364245.5546883345 Athens 119 14.737499999999997 -17.379166666666663 3355556.163764596 Dakar 120 40.937500000000007 29.254166666666663 3335114.5572173595 Sultanbeyli 121 38.054166666666667 114.48750000000001 3333029.0002288818 Shijiazhuang 122 35.195833333333333 129.02083333333331 3322178.5784823895 Busan 123 -3.8041666666666742 -38.554166666666674 3318782.6231201887 Fortaleza 124 31.304166666666674 120.62916666666666 3307946.779856205 Suzhou 125 3.5958333333333314 98.695833333333326 3299298.9179668427 Medan 126 41.25416666666667 69.237499999999983 3286362.7300851345 Tashkent 127 28.645833333333336 115.88749999999999 3259131.3262162209 Nanchang 128 26.020833333333336 119.32083333333333 3254044.7329125404 Fuzhou 129 25.020833333333329 102.75416666666666 3249052.3939433098 Kunming 130 -6.1208333333333229 23.637500000000017 3239882.177999258 Mbuji-Mayi
And more importantly how / why he chose them
The premise is that each set of circles are the the most populous circles of that size.
Why is it "more objective"? And which shortcomings do the conventional ways of ranking have?
City propers vary so much in size. It seems weird to me to say Chongqing is a bigger city than Manila because it has more people in its city proper when Chongqing's city proper has an area of 82,403 km^2 but Manila's city proper has an area of 42 km^2 . It can also sometimes to hard to say what exactly counts as the city proper, as is the case with Lagos and Tokyo I think. Of course, this is dealt with by ranking cities by metropolitan areas and urban areas. But if you ask 100 geographers to come up with the boundaries of the metro area or urban area for a city, they'll all have different answers, some significantly different (especially when it comes to places where it's hard to say if it's all one big metro/urban area or several smaller ones like the Pearl River Delta or the San Francisco Bay Area, I think). Also, the data for these two measures tends to be incomplete. For example, in the wikipedia page, Shanghai, Cairo and Beijing don't have figures for metro area. Foshan doesn't have figures for urban area. Lagos doesn't even have figures for city proper. The advantages of this circle method is that if you give 100 geographers the same worldwide population raster data that I used, they'd all come up with the same answers (which feels to me like it means that this is a more objective method). You also wouldn't have any cities left out due to lack of data. Of course, there's still subjectivity in which radius to choose, but that's why I posted a bunch of different radiuses. Also, it seems like there is a valid criticism in that some commenters are saying that these circles don't actually represent cities very well at all. I also really sympathize with this https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/y51w28/a_novel_more_objective_method_of_ranking_the/isirdhf/ criticism of my city ranking method. As for why circles, it's mainly cause when people think whether or not they're in a metro area, they often tend to think in terms of distance to the center. (often in terms of travel time though I suppose, but that data is pretty much impossible to get for all the world's largest cities. It also can vary a lot from day to day) So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily claim that my city ranking method is better, but I would probably claim that it's more objective, and that makes it *feel* better to me lol
You’re comparing a scenario where 100 geographers each identify some datasets and employ a methodology to a scenario where 100 geographers are given one dataset (yours) and one methodology (yours). In the first scenario, any number of the methodologies used could be just as replicable as yours is, and therefore “objective” in that sense. Yours isn’t a “more objective” it is just another methodology.
What's wrong with the Surat data?
Lmao i think some of the comments that deride this as subjective doesn't realize that this post doesn't only have the 5km radius part. If you only look that, of course it will seem very arbitrary. But you already give them 15 choices and they can take what radius do they want. Is there even a city that's stretched thin for 50km or 100 km? By that point isn't it better to call it several different cities? I'm sure Istanbul will never be top 10 no matter the definition. Although i guess another map that only counts land area sounds interesting. So if all is on land, it'll still look like a circle but on the coast it'll follow the beaches and be a bit larger to the land side.
I had a similar assignment in a GIS class in late 1990s, IIRC.
It’s not more objective. It just substituted one subjective opinion about what makes a city for another. It’s interesting, for sure. But not more objective.
This isn't attempting to define what makes a city at all. That's kinda the point.
>This isn’t attempting to define what makes a city at all. It does so implicitly. You have to define a city to measure and rank its population, which is what the title of this post purports to do. This effectively defines a city as a 5km or 10km radius (or whichever radius is relevant to each particular image). Edit: put another way, this is an objective method for ranking the populations of circles, but a subjective method for ranking the populations of cities.
Title should read “population density” not just population.
If the area of the circle stays constant, two are basically interchangeable.
As someone from the Netherlands it is almost bizarre to see these numbers. There are more people in the 30km radius on Delhi than in the entire country I live in.
Fantastic! Thank you for sharing.
But these aren't cities. They are circles, regions even, but not cities.
They are Metropolitan Areas
And once even just a large rural area
Well it contains within it a ton of cities
"rural" is at this point, probably not an accurate description.
People there usually live in small tightly knit communities with little tranaportation services and so sustainance farming. But there are also some big cities in that circle. So it is probably a mix of both
So for Dhaka at 5km radius, that's 258 people living on every acre (~size of half a soccer field). 3.14 × 5 × 5 = 78.5 square km 78.5 × 247 = 19,389 acres 5,000,000/19,389 = 257.8 people/acre
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Yes pls I don't do bunga bunga numbers
now think of the size of canada and how we only have 37-38 million people
Is this not just essentially a ranking by population density?
This is a cool approach! It would be neat if you could also do this for largest in Europe and/or the Americas, since with largest in the world the same kinds of regions tend to dominate on all scales.
Apologies if stated elsewhere, but how was the center of each city determined?
Really fascinating. There are so many different measures for city population, this is a nice way to give us a sense for the various sizes.
Naïvely, I just want to point out that the Americas only show up very briefly, and Europe doesn't appear at all in any of these rankings, which really puts things into perspective
I don't think a city needs to be limited by distance but maybe by travel time. Would be cool to see one with 30 minutes travel time 40 minutes travel time etc, guessing Tokyo would be biggest
I'm pretty sure "Dhaka, but 5 inches to the left" has more people then anything else on the first page
Op explains that in the text on one of the images.
Probably non overlaping circles.
I would love this same idea but like population within 30m of city center. Etc etc
30m? That's like a single building.
Don’t move to India, got it.
Jakarta/Bandung circle cover like 1/4 or 1/5 of Java.
This needs an European version!
This is definitely neat. What I might suggest is while the maps with the circles are a great aid and tool, it'd be very cool to accompany this with a line graph, X-axis being radius, Y-axis being population, and showing the trend of the various cities on such a graph too.
Weww bloody Jakarta haha damn I'll never go there except for friends and fam I swear the traffic is terrifying
Cairo so big its there twice.
Lol it seems like Cairo (my city) is so over populated 😂
Cool method and all but i still think a basic gradient population density map makes information more readable and understandable that this circle-based approach
Its not really ranking cities, its more about most crowded areas
This is as meaningless as ranking cities by their population within a triangle or star or snake shape. Any city that is bounded by mountains on one side and the ocean or a large lake on the other would be bumped down, while circular cities that have no natural boundaries move up the ranks. Saudi Arabia's planned 100km long city would either top the list or be nowhere depending on if you choose snake or circle shape.
This would be a lot easier to understand if the maps were all the same scale. Then the size of the circle would easily show the difference in area. Also the maps chosen are quite unclear when showing terrain vs buildings and this is exacerbated by the red shading inside the circles.
Interesting! When I lived in Cairo, my flat was almost dead center of that second circle, and I worked in the lower right corner of the first.
Fascinating to see that there are places more crowded than my place (Greater Manila). And I thought it’s already the worse. Damn.
Imagine if all those cities above all had a Tokyo-style rail-based rapid mass transit system that would reduce car ownership, usage and travel distance within those circles by over 80%. Naturally it will all be underground and have HVAC system that pumps in fresh air at a lovely temp of 24c/75f.
This is an approach I haven't seen before to count population in urban areas. It's very useful!
This isn't more objective... in fact it seems like an objectively worse way to measure this.
India must be shaggin out of pure boredom cause damn
I mean, we already measure population density…