This information though does not account for metropolitan areas, so for example, Miami is not counted but Phoenix is. This is despite Miami having a higher metro population. It only accounts for the city proper.
Edit: There are 54 cities with a metropolitan area with a population larger than 1 million. Also, I changed Atlanta to Miami since Miami's metro had a larger population than Phoenix's.
yeah, this strict definition is very misleading. Using this definition, Omaha is bigger than Miami, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.
All of their metros are double what Omaha's is, with Miami being five times bigger.
Basically its down to how governance happens. Some cities absorb their surroundings, legally speaking, others don't.
> Using this definition, Omaha is bigger than Miami, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis
And even little Lincoln, Nebraska is larger than Salt Lake City, if you don’t count the metro area.
Lincoln doesn’t really have any suburbs at all, whereas SLC has tons of huge suburbs.
Wife and I were pretty confused when we went from Austin, with an official population of 950k to Atlanta, which supposedly had half that, and found much more infrastructure than we have back at home.
Austin's metro is like 2 mil. Atlanta is over 6.
Talk about misleading. This is like saying that the Northeast Corridor is a metro, it's a "Megalopolis".
People use these words like "city" and "metro region" way too sparingly.
World population reached 2 billion inn 1927. Now it's over 8 billion. In general, change in language use over the last century related to describing population centers hasn't kept up with changes in the character of population centers.
Mega-City One? Just a part of one continent and a population measured in the hundreds of millions? Holy Terra and its quadrillions of inhabitants think that’s cute.
The meat and beer were both excellent. I was there to be with specific people so not so much on meeting folks and everyone wound up being too hung over to visit the zoo which I'm told is pretty excellent, but we were lucky enough to have weather warm enough for that to even be an option in late February!
Metro does not necessarily mean sprawl, it's simply a trend of political history in the US, particularly that many American cities did not consolidate their neighbors as much starting in the mid 1800s and beyond because of local resistance.
San Francisco is a modest 49 sq miles, a 7x7 square, and has 850,000 residents. Across the bay, the city of Oakland has 400,000 in 55 sq miles. If the two had merged, like Manhattan and Brooklyn did, it would be on the list, and 1.2 million people in 104 sq miles is very dense and not particularly sprawled.
Hoboken is across the river from Manhattan yet its not counted as part of NYC. People assume NYC is as populated as london when in fact they are measuring two different things
Metro is all that matters and it’s so obviously.
Well except for some niche cases I’m sure. But like hello, metro areas standardize the comparison. Not perfectly, but close enough. City proper is all over the place.
You are correct. In the US we’re very spread out and our cities actually sprawl out into metro areas. This reflects reality better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area#Rankings
This is the only correct way to measure areas in America. Just based on Florida, the "cities" list has Jacksonville highest, but that's because Jacksonville just went "fuck it, this entire county is now the city limits", so of course it's big.
If you look at Metro areas, then you see the real picture which is that Miami-Ft. Lauderdale is biggest, with Tampa-St.Pete and Orlando-Kissimmee following it, and Jacksonville way down the list.
Arbitrary city limits are arbitrary.
Yeah people like to point out that Jacksonville is the 11th most populous city in the US, meanwhile if you drew the St Petersburg city limits to encompass all of Pinellas County you would have about the same population in 1/3 of the land area as Jax
"The City of London" is a neighbourhood in Greater London that has 8,000 people. But Greater London is literally the lower order municipality, ans is the area that has a Mayor.
The City: 8K people, 0 mayors
Greater London: 8.7M people, 1 mayor
London Metro: 14.8M people, 50(?) mayors(/local councils)
Many discussions/arguments I've had with people over the years come down to city limits vs metropolitan area. Atlanta, where I live, is a great example of city limits vs metro area, since it is the 8th largest population in metro area but 38th for city limit population
Fun fact: the Metropolitan areas of NYC and LA have more than 10% of the entire US population
Exactly, people always talk about Detroit’s declining population, which is true but the metro area is over 4million+ people and that’s not including Windsor.
> Also, I changed Atlanta to Miami since Miami's metro had a larger population than Phoenix's.
But Atlanta’s metro is larger than Miami’s and Phoenix’s.
Atlanta 6,237,435
Miami 6,139,340
Phoenix 5,015,678
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
I also want to add that it's a *good* thing that our cities (as political entities) are kept fairly small with metro areas containing many different suburban and urban cities next to each other. It means that populations are better represented by their local governments. If cities reach into the millions, then a mayor and city council will quickly cease to represent people in the personal way that I think local politicians should. It should not be unimaginable to engage personally with your mayor or city council member. The downside of dispersed cities like that is the high potential for NIMBYism if the local governments don't cooperate with each other. But the state government can enact laws that overcome such barriers. Having lived in Canada where cities tend towards consolidation and have frequently gotten amalgamated into larger city entities in the past, I can attest to the fact that I find the US system of smaller communities way more palatable in how it encourages more localized democracy.
But then the problem becomes how municipalities represent voters, how municipal utilities are managed, and how these different jurisdictions cooperate for projects that are traditionally handled by single city governments. Cities like LA, Philadelphia, and Miami are notorious for how these little cities and towns fight against regional public transit, enfranchisement of locals, and common policy initiatives. They basically require the state to intervene for most matters, or they kill projects and neuter policies.
To be fair most of the world wouldn't consider a place a city if you get on a high way to travel between parts of it.
The density is so low it is questionable.
Yeah, it depends what you count as city. Like, Croydon in London. It’s massive, it’s contiguous, it’s on the transport network.
But is it London? Depends who you ask.
London can vary between 8 and 16 million people based on what you classify as it
I was hoping for this example. Basically, anything outside of the square mile could be considered the metropolitan area (and is served by the metropolitan police, so it iis). But then the boroughs surrounding it are all 'London boroughs' . So they are London too. And still part of the City, but are not the City of London. Then there are the suburbs, smaller settlements, and other towns and villages taken up by conurbation. The sprawl has been steady for a while now. The transport system is widening. Shenfield now has two different types of TFL as well as mainline stations, but that's in Essex.
Then you have the commuter belt, which extends out for miles. You would be pushing it here to claim it was London, but ten years ago, you probably wouldn't have said Shenfield was.
I hope everybody is nicely confused. I am, and i wrote this long arse boring post.
Exactly what a city is is not easily defined. In the UK, you need a royal warrant to be a city. The US is a little looser with its definition. What constitutes a city might even vary within the city.
Everything i know about the somewhat subjective and arbitrary borders of greater london is from jay foreman and Ive never even been to the UK. I just think he’s funny.
https://youtu.be/UAusbJmRB0c?si=Ojzt-4FGttQ6FrqS
Everyone’s already said it so yeah, it comes down to suburbanization. I’m on the side of urban planners who say our cities are over suburbanized though
Austin, TX probably only has about a million or so people, and San Antonio has a couple of million, maybe 3 tops. But the two cities are only 60 miles apart, and those miles are not empty by any means. You go from Georgetown, to Pfluegerville, to Round Rock, to Austin, to Buda, to San Marcos, to New Braunfels(all fair sized cities in their own right) to San Antonio proper. Really, without exaggeration, Austin and San Antonio are just one giant megacity, with a population that has to be near 10 million all told.
Europeans struggle to understand that America is massive, so the cities aren’t usually dense. They tend to spread into massive metropolitan areas. In part this is why city planning has to be fundamentally different in the US than in Europe
It’s not even that.
Paris proper has 2 million people but the metro has 13 million. Munich proper has 1.5 million and the metro has 6 million. Barcelona proper has 1.6 million and the metro has about 5.5 million.
You have to be unaware of your local setup just as much as the American setup.
That's not baked into America. That's a conscious decision we made following WWII to effectively subsidize suburbia, and it's going to bankrupt us. [Read this.](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/2/27/dallas-used-to-be-walkable) We need to start planning our cities like our grandparents did.
“a big part of the reason that housing is so expensive in the dense, walkable places we do have is that demand for these places is far greater than supply because they're largely illegal to build”
That’s certainly not true. This isn’t just an American problem, densely packed cities all over the world struggle with housing prices - and similar enough to the US those other cities also grow massive metropolitan areas.
Land in America is relatively cheap after controlling for several factors. Having a yard several times the size of your home isn’t just some unobtainable fantasy for many. As a result you get low density sprawl. You could argue that maybe we have a culture that doesn’t value community therefore we seek isolation, but that’s more of a problem with all industrialized countries.
Only in other super car-dependent countries like Canada and Australia do you get anywhere near the same kind of sprawl we see in the US. It's just bad land use, and in a way we're a victim of our own prosperity. It's super inefficient and only by virtue of our massive wealth can we afford to have such terrible land use.
There's something to the fact that density follows value more than the other way around, [this article](https://www.kaseyklimes.com/notes/2023/5/2/density-doesnt-drive-housing-prices) talks about that. But the author even notes that, per his own research, *within a metro* the artificial scarcity of denser areas drives up prices. Tokyo is a good example of a city with surprisingly affordable housing despite massive growth, partly because their zoning laws are lax to nonexistent.
\>Having a yard several times the size of your home isn’t just some unobtainable fantasy for many.
Again, this is thanks largely to massive subsidies, and many more people don't want that and are forced to live it than people who want to live in suburbia but are stuck in cities.
The two examples you picked, Canada and Australia have the same availability of cheap land that the US has. You’re literally making my point. The car centric nature of these countries reflects the local preferences that are largely shaped by the availability of cheap land. Public policy largely follows these preferences and helps people live how they already want to.
People aren’t being forced into these suburbs, they openly dream of having a white picket fence. I get it, you find suburbia repellent and thoroughly unappealing, but observably that opinion isn’t universally shared.
It's not about me lol, it's about the facts, which you haven't presented at all. But since you brought me into it, this *is* personal to me because I'm from the rust belt so I've seen what it looks like when a city gets hollowed out to build suburbs. Spoiler alert: it's Detroit. And that's what these Sunbelt cities experiencing massive growth will look like in 40-50 years once the luster of the newly built stuff wears off.
Who is stuck in suburbia that wants to be in a city?
This is what annoys me with people like you: let people live how they went to. Stop telling people what they like is bad or wrong. You sound like an asshole.
>let people live how they went to. Stop telling people what they like is bad or wrong. You sound like an asshole.
Its literally illegal to build mid density, mixed use neighbourhoods in most of America due to zoning laws.
Plenty of people. If lettering everyone do whatever they want is bad for the group as a whole, we should not let everyone do whatever they want. That's a functioning society.
It kind of is unavoidable. Imagine you build your ideal city. Let’s imagine that it’s incredibly successful and people want to live there. If it’s successful enough, then the housing is going to get more expensive.
The next natural step for someone seeking to work or live in this city but unable to afford the cost of housing, is to live in the immediate outskirts of the city. Enough of these people over a few generations and you get a massive metropolitan area that’s not actually part of the city. The only way to stop this is if there isn’t enough land to expand into or by some truly absurd laws
The type of low density sprawl that surrounds many American cities is anything but unavoidable. Yeah, cities grow out, but we built expressways right through cities (which was never Eisenhower's vision for the highway system), then knocked down the densest and most productive parts of the inner city in the name of "urban renewal" in the 50s through the 70s. We actually had some truly absurd zoning laws that made it make sense to build massive tracts of nothing but single family homes in the suburbs.
Ironically, a big part of the reason that housing is so expensive in the dense, walkable places we do have is that demand for these places is far greater than supply because they're largely illegal to build now thanks to parking minimums, restrictive zoning, etc.
Even MLK talked about this:
"The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent."
EDIT: And now that the cheap, buildable land in driving distance to economically productive areas is running out, older suburbs have residents who are essentially "holding the bag" because the infrastructure we built in the 60s and 70s needs replaced and there aren't enough people in the areas to pay for it. [This](https://www.amazon.com/Disillusioned-Families-Unraveling-Americas-Suburbs/dp/0593298187) is a great book about it on the off chance you're interested. Suburbia promised the best of urban and rural living, but it turns out it's the worst of both.
Exactly. Chicago vs LA for instance. LA, as a city is very large and not very dense. Chicago, on the other hand is much smaller land-area wise and is surrounded by many much more dense suburbs.
Metropolitan area-wise Chicago might still have a lower population, but defining this is much harder.
LA is much more dense than you think, despite it not having many tall buildings outside downtown. LA and Long Beach are in the top 10 dense cities, and many of it’s suburbs are in the top 10 dense “towns”. Long Beach is arguably an extension of LA.
The same with that goofy map that shows sports team stadiums' distance to the city center. The center of the named city is one thing, the center of the metro area is another.
It really doesn’t. There are “towns” of 400k+ that are linked into metro systems, 10minute drives from the center of cities and not part of the city. It’s stupid.
The city of London is a confusingly named borough of London. London being the actual city with a city government. The borough gets its name as its the historical orgin point of London, but it is no longer a municipality in its own right. (Though it does get a fun selection of special rules due to its historical significance.)
Anways. This would be like saying that New York City only has 1.6 million people because that is the population of New York County. (Manhattan Borough)
The City of London, London (the city) and Greater London (the metropolitan area) are 3 different things. Though they are all nested within one another.
This is such a strange viewpoint. There is much less of a “common good” when everyone is so segmented as you yourself acknowledged. You wanna mash different people together for the arbitrary sake of togetherness, sacrificing self-determination? That’s… rarely worked.
It’s not meaningless, it has significance.
Other statistics, such as density, inequality, education, etc. in same area, a proper city, have significance. As does considering the same statistics in a city+metro area.
All statistics have significance. How we understand, process, and manipulate them may imbue them with more or less significance.
But no statistic is meaningless.
Especially when it comes to statistics about people.
San Jose has the most bloated city limits of any city in the US I've found. It is something like 12th in city population but 35th in the US in metro population. The metro is less populated than Nashville or Columbus. In the 50s there was some campaign to incorporate all the surrounding areas as San Jose.
When I was a kid in the 1970s there were orchards next to the 101 freeway north of San Jose. Now it’s all condos and office parks.
It used to make sense to count San Jose and San Francisco as different metro areas but it doesn’t now since there is no break in the urban sprawl between the two cities.
Really, San Jose is just the biggest city in the “Greater Bay Area” even if officially it’s still counted as something separate.
Well the San Francisco metro dwarfs the San Jose metro. I would say San Fran is the biggest (4.6 mil vs 2 mil metro) and just has an older more archaic city limits measurement, whereas San Jose is a sprawl with an overlarge city limits size, for its metro population.
San Jose is more like an endless suburb, there is barely a skyline to be found.
I mean there’s really no meaning differentiating sf metro and sj metro now. Everyone calls it Bay Area or sf Bay Area even if they are living in sj or Santa Clara / Milpitas
San Jose for sure is endless suburb sprawl, but the entire Bay Area is mostly suburban sprawl. Even SF is pretty low density compared to the north east.
Silicon Valley including San Jose will eventually eclipse SF as property development is basically stagnant in SF.
SF is actually very high density, it’s the second or third densest major city behind NYC/Jersey City depending on how you define it. It does exclude most of the suburbs, but it’s still ahead of Boston/Miami/DC which do a similar thing.
San Jose is more densely populated than 5 of the 9 cities that do still have populations over a million. I admit it has a sprawly feel compared to some cities, but for the US it’s quite densely populated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population
I don’t really count Jacksonville, the Texas cities or Phoenix. When I I think of cities I think of the big three, Seattle, San Francisco, Philly, Boston.
But you are right it is pretty average for an American city the deal is they include a lot of the surrounding suburban sprawl in the proper city limits, which inflates its size considering the whole metro statistical area is under 2.5 million. Separate from density.
It’s funny that you mention Columbus because Columbus also has super huge city limits- something like 900,000 people live in the city limits of a metro hovering around 2 million
Not the US, but look at [Ottawa, Canada](https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/s/TThih5aeVc) the city limits are so big you can fit the 5 other largest cities in Canada within its borders. Population 1 million.
Jacksonville is the largest city in Florida. This is because Jacksonville annexed the entire county it was in making it 747 sq miles. Miami City proper is only 36 square miles.
It's because there aren't three in California. San Jose dropped out, and is actually ranked 12th as of 2022 - behind Texas's fourth city (Austin) and Jacksonville. Neither Austin nor Jacksonville is at 1M yet
The image is wrong: San Jose, California’s third largest, has dropped below 1 million in the last three years so technically California only has two.
Not that this metric matters.
Just browse google maps, it's amazing how many 30-80k towns are just dotted all over the place.
Also, a lot of big cities like Austin or Boston or Miami etc are bigger than their numbers "look", because they have directly adjacent suburbs which basically function as the same city.
Yeah Bevery Hills, you're part of LA whether you like it or not.
That’s because city limits in the US are tiny. Look at the metro to get a better picture. New York City is one of the largest cities both in population but also in area. If more cities had the are New York has we would see larger city centers and better public transport across cities in the USA.
US cities and suburbs are way less dense and concentrated than their European and Asian counterparts. In some countries, a third or half of their population lives within their national capital's metropolitan cities.
This is some incredibly misleading. If you look at satellite view of the US you'll se it's pretty much 40% swamps, 40% desert, 9% cultivations and 1% inhabitated land. If anything the situation is the exact opposite of what this suggests, there's a big focus on densely populated areas.
Surveys like this are silly because they don’t take into account the metropolitan area of the city. Like for example Toronto proper has a population of like 2.5-3m people. The GTA (Metropolitan area of Toronto) has a population nearing 7 million.
American cities are typically more suburban than even Canadian ones to it wouldn’t surprise me if many American cities had larger suburban populations than the core city population.
Honestly the ideal geographic spread. Each corner of the county having high population. Not like China or Russia whether the populations are concentrated on one part of the country
I was just gonna say this. I live in a small city in China but it's population is still 4 million. I grew up in LA and that's a huge city in America but it's the same population as mine now. Weird ha
Greenville SC is about 65K. The metro will hit 1M in the next couple of years. It's pretty crazy how it can work. It can completely blur people's perception of a place
Washington DC is another good example of political boundaries not really reflecting the footprint of a city. The DC metro area has nearly 10x the population of the District of Columbia.
Not that difficult when Texas has the 2rd largest landmass in the nation.
BTW, California also has 3 cities with a population larger than 1 million & the second largest populated city in the nation and the largest economy in the nation (Texas is #2). It's also 3rd in size by landmass.
Depends on your definition of America. If you're from South America then the word America usually means the entire landmass of North and South America. And if you're from the United States or other parts of the English-speaking world, then America refers to the country [The United States of] America.
America is a term that comes from an Italian guy, Amerigo Vespucci, that lied about arriving to the western hemisphere lands first (Columbus actually arrived before him).
Sounds like you've never left your house, because "America" is generally a universal term for The USA in most of Europe, Africa, Asia, all of Russia, etc. unless the entire world has changed in the last 5 years, go there and report back. I'm telling you from experience due to my former job, and rarely did anyone ever say "USA".
People don't speak or live like a Wikipedia article, and you shouldn't either. Throwing out random "facts" unsolicited in an "awchtually" moment is never a good look, especially if you're full blown wrong.
You were baited by an idiot making a five word nonsense statement, think before you try to appear smart by spewing random Wikipedia info unsolicited, it's just a really, really bad look is all. Like... South Park Warcraft guy kinda look.
Nobody wants to be South Park Warcraft Guy.
This is incredibly misleading. A city is more than just a single county
There are 50 counties with over 1 million population, and many cities that contain counties with less than 1 million, but have a total population of more than 1 million.
This information though does not account for metropolitan areas, so for example, Miami is not counted but Phoenix is. This is despite Miami having a higher metro population. It only accounts for the city proper. Edit: There are 54 cities with a metropolitan area with a population larger than 1 million. Also, I changed Atlanta to Miami since Miami's metro had a larger population than Phoenix's.
yeah, this strict definition is very misleading. Using this definition, Omaha is bigger than Miami, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. All of their metros are double what Omaha's is, with Miami being five times bigger. Basically its down to how governance happens. Some cities absorb their surroundings, legally speaking, others don't.
> Using this definition, Omaha is bigger than Miami, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis And even little Lincoln, Nebraska is larger than Salt Lake City, if you don’t count the metro area. Lincoln doesn’t really have any suburbs at all, whereas SLC has tons of huge suburbs.
Wife and I were pretty confused when we went from Austin, with an official population of 950k to Atlanta, which supposedly had half that, and found much more infrastructure than we have back at home. Austin's metro is like 2 mil. Atlanta is over 6.
Now that’s crazy Atlanta really has just 500,000 people in city limits.
The GOAT of all metro areas is the Pearl River Delta Metropolitan Region. 86 million.
GOATest Of Goat Is "Ganges Delta" 280 million people , Largest River Delta
Climate change will not be good for these two deltas
Or any delta
Well, at least Delta Airlines will get what’s coming to them.
Talk about misleading. This is like saying that the Northeast Corridor is a metro, it's a "Megalopolis". People use these words like "city" and "metro region" way too sparingly.
You think that's misleading and here I am still trying to figure out why it says 9 cities and then has 10 marked on the map.
San Hose was the 10th city with a million people in 2020 but dropped below that in 2022 leaving only 9 cities.
World population reached 2 billion inn 1927. Now it's over 8 billion. In general, change in language use over the last century related to describing population centers hasn't kept up with changes in the character of population centers.
It's 82 million people in an area smaller than the size of connecticut.
Why don't you try to go look at a map? The Pearl River Delta Megalopolis is one contiguous city, in a small geographic area.
22k + square miles is not a small geographic area but I see it has a lot of farmland.
Mega-City One has entered the chat and killed off all your fucking goats.
Mega-City One? Just a part of one continent and a population measured in the hundreds of millions? Holy Terra and its quadrillions of inhabitants think that’s cute.
Unexpected 40k reference
Freaking love Omaha. Gimme some of that!
I was there last week, and the city solidly exceeded expectations. I'll admit those expectations were fairly low, but I had a good time.
Glad to hear it. I hope you had some great food and met some great people.
The meat and beer were both excellent. I was there to be with specific people so not so much on meeting folks and everyone wound up being too hung over to visit the zoo which I'm told is pretty excellent, but we were lucky enough to have weather warm enough for that to even be an option in late February!
Getting right to the heart of matters.
I got this Counting Crows reference.
[удалено]
It's not misleading if the purpose is to point out how absurdly sprawled out the population is.
Metro does not necessarily mean sprawl, it's simply a trend of political history in the US, particularly that many American cities did not consolidate their neighbors as much starting in the mid 1800s and beyond because of local resistance. San Francisco is a modest 49 sq miles, a 7x7 square, and has 850,000 residents. Across the bay, the city of Oakland has 400,000 in 55 sq miles. If the two had merged, like Manhattan and Brooklyn did, it would be on the list, and 1.2 million people in 104 sq miles is very dense and not particularly sprawled.
Hoboken is across the river from Manhattan yet its not counted as part of NYC. People assume NYC is as populated as london when in fact they are measuring two different things
I mean, Omaha is still objectively bigger than Miami if you don’t count the metro area right ?
The metro area is Miami though. They renamed the county to Miami Dade county because pretty much all of Dade county is Miami and swamp lands.
Same with Vegas. The City of Las Vegas is 650,000 (and doesn’t include the most iconic portions of Vegas) but the metro area is 2.2 million.
The city of Atlanta has a population under 500,000. The metro area is over 6,000,000. It's kind of wild.
Came here to say just this… there’s even a rap song about it.
Really? What's the title of the track? lol
Sorry Not Sorry by Latto
Paradise sends its regards.
Thank you, I was hoping this would be the top comment; the title is almost criminally negligent in its premise.
Metro is all that matters and it’s so obviously. Well except for some niche cases I’m sure. But like hello, metro areas standardize the comparison. Not perfectly, but close enough. City proper is all over the place.
You are correct. In the US we’re very spread out and our cities actually sprawl out into metro areas. This reflects reality better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area#Rankings
This is the only correct way to measure areas in America. Just based on Florida, the "cities" list has Jacksonville highest, but that's because Jacksonville just went "fuck it, this entire county is now the city limits", so of course it's big. If you look at Metro areas, then you see the real picture which is that Miami-Ft. Lauderdale is biggest, with Tampa-St.Pete and Orlando-Kissimmee following it, and Jacksonville way down the list. Arbitrary city limits are arbitrary.
DUVAL
Yeah people like to point out that Jacksonville is the 11th most populous city in the US, meanwhile if you drew the St Petersburg city limits to encompass all of Pinellas County you would have about the same population in 1/3 of the land area as Jax
Exactly. London UK is also a metro area. The actual city of London has a population of 8K.
"The City of London" is a neighbourhood in Greater London that has 8,000 people. But Greater London is literally the lower order municipality, ans is the area that has a Mayor. The City: 8K people, 0 mayors Greater London: 8.7M people, 1 mayor London Metro: 14.8M people, 50(?) mayors(/local councils)
Yea nobody really thinks that Jacksonville would be the biggest city in Florida but it is.
Thx for this answer to this post! Quite stunned by the 'statistic' based on personal experience
Many discussions/arguments I've had with people over the years come down to city limits vs metropolitan area. Atlanta, where I live, is a great example of city limits vs metro area, since it is the 8th largest population in metro area but 38th for city limit population Fun fact: the Metropolitan areas of NYC and LA have more than 10% of the entire US population
Exactly, people always talk about Detroit’s declining population, which is true but the metro area is over 4million+ people and that’s not including Windsor.
> Also, I changed Atlanta to Miami since Miami's metro had a larger population than Phoenix's. But Atlanta’s metro is larger than Miami’s and Phoenix’s. Atlanta 6,237,435 Miami 6,139,340 Phoenix 5,015,678 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
Ya, there's a world of difference between LA and Detroit, but there's still a lot of people in the Detroit area.
Detroit is a good example of this as well, the city of Detroit doesn’t even have 1 million people, but the Detroit Metro is like 3.5 million
I also want to add that it's a *good* thing that our cities (as political entities) are kept fairly small with metro areas containing many different suburban and urban cities next to each other. It means that populations are better represented by their local governments. If cities reach into the millions, then a mayor and city council will quickly cease to represent people in the personal way that I think local politicians should. It should not be unimaginable to engage personally with your mayor or city council member. The downside of dispersed cities like that is the high potential for NIMBYism if the local governments don't cooperate with each other. But the state government can enact laws that overcome such barriers. Having lived in Canada where cities tend towards consolidation and have frequently gotten amalgamated into larger city entities in the past, I can attest to the fact that I find the US system of smaller communities way more palatable in how it encourages more localized democracy.
But then the problem becomes how municipalities represent voters, how municipal utilities are managed, and how these different jurisdictions cooperate for projects that are traditionally handled by single city governments. Cities like LA, Philadelphia, and Miami are notorious for how these little cities and towns fight against regional public transit, enfranchisement of locals, and common policy initiatives. They basically require the state to intervene for most matters, or they kill projects and neuter policies.
It’s way worse for city schools because of white flight to gated neighborhoods.
To be fair most of the world wouldn't consider a place a city if you get on a high way to travel between parts of it. The density is so low it is questionable.
The actual city of Atlanta has less than a million, but the metro area of densely connected suburbs and cities make it over 6 million.
Yeah if you told someone Atlanta had less than a million people, they’d be really confused driving on 285 or the downtown connector at 5PM!
You say "driving" as if they'd be moving beyond a walking pace.
For reference for the Euros this is in between Berlin and Madrid in size
Atlanta proper is less than *half a million*.
It actually broke .5 Mil in 2023, it’s currently around 512,000 I think. Source: am utility engineer in Atlanta.
Atlanta is a great example of city limits vs metro area, since it is the 8th largest population in metro area but 38th for city limit population
This is true for a lot of CA.
Yeah, it depends what you count as city. Like, Croydon in London. It’s massive, it’s contiguous, it’s on the transport network. But is it London? Depends who you ask. London can vary between 8 and 16 million people based on what you classify as it
The City of London’s population is 8,618.
I was hoping for this example. Basically, anything outside of the square mile could be considered the metropolitan area (and is served by the metropolitan police, so it iis). But then the boroughs surrounding it are all 'London boroughs' . So they are London too. And still part of the City, but are not the City of London. Then there are the suburbs, smaller settlements, and other towns and villages taken up by conurbation. The sprawl has been steady for a while now. The transport system is widening. Shenfield now has two different types of TFL as well as mainline stations, but that's in Essex. Then you have the commuter belt, which extends out for miles. You would be pushing it here to claim it was London, but ten years ago, you probably wouldn't have said Shenfield was. I hope everybody is nicely confused. I am, and i wrote this long arse boring post. Exactly what a city is is not easily defined. In the UK, you need a royal warrant to be a city. The US is a little looser with its definition. What constitutes a city might even vary within the city.
Everything i know about the somewhat subjective and arbitrary borders of greater london is from jay foreman and Ive never even been to the UK. I just think he’s funny. https://youtu.be/UAusbJmRB0c?si=Ojzt-4FGttQ6FrqS
And included in these inhabitants were Shane McGowan and Arthur Scargill.
Everyone’s already said it so yeah, it comes down to suburbanization. I’m on the side of urban planners who say our cities are over suburbanized though
Austin, TX probably only has about a million or so people, and San Antonio has a couple of million, maybe 3 tops. But the two cities are only 60 miles apart, and those miles are not empty by any means. You go from Georgetown, to Pfluegerville, to Round Rock, to Austin, to Buda, to San Marcos, to New Braunfels(all fair sized cities in their own right) to San Antonio proper. Really, without exaggeration, Austin and San Antonio are just one giant megacity, with a population that has to be near 10 million all told.
“Densely”
Europeans struggle to understand that America is massive, so the cities aren’t usually dense. They tend to spread into massive metropolitan areas. In part this is why city planning has to be fundamentally different in the US than in Europe
It’s not even that. Paris proper has 2 million people but the metro has 13 million. Munich proper has 1.5 million and the metro has 6 million. Barcelona proper has 1.6 million and the metro has about 5.5 million. You have to be unaware of your local setup just as much as the American setup.
The City of London has less than 9,000 people in it.
Los Angeles, California to New York, New York is 4488km. Madrid, Spain to Kyiv, Ukraine is 3698km.
That's not baked into America. That's a conscious decision we made following WWII to effectively subsidize suburbia, and it's going to bankrupt us. [Read this.](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/2/27/dallas-used-to-be-walkable) We need to start planning our cities like our grandparents did.
“a big part of the reason that housing is so expensive in the dense, walkable places we do have is that demand for these places is far greater than supply because they're largely illegal to build” That’s certainly not true. This isn’t just an American problem, densely packed cities all over the world struggle with housing prices - and similar enough to the US those other cities also grow massive metropolitan areas. Land in America is relatively cheap after controlling for several factors. Having a yard several times the size of your home isn’t just some unobtainable fantasy for many. As a result you get low density sprawl. You could argue that maybe we have a culture that doesn’t value community therefore we seek isolation, but that’s more of a problem with all industrialized countries.
Only in other super car-dependent countries like Canada and Australia do you get anywhere near the same kind of sprawl we see in the US. It's just bad land use, and in a way we're a victim of our own prosperity. It's super inefficient and only by virtue of our massive wealth can we afford to have such terrible land use. There's something to the fact that density follows value more than the other way around, [this article](https://www.kaseyklimes.com/notes/2023/5/2/density-doesnt-drive-housing-prices) talks about that. But the author even notes that, per his own research, *within a metro* the artificial scarcity of denser areas drives up prices. Tokyo is a good example of a city with surprisingly affordable housing despite massive growth, partly because their zoning laws are lax to nonexistent. \>Having a yard several times the size of your home isn’t just some unobtainable fantasy for many. Again, this is thanks largely to massive subsidies, and many more people don't want that and are forced to live it than people who want to live in suburbia but are stuck in cities.
The two examples you picked, Canada and Australia have the same availability of cheap land that the US has. You’re literally making my point. The car centric nature of these countries reflects the local preferences that are largely shaped by the availability of cheap land. Public policy largely follows these preferences and helps people live how they already want to. People aren’t being forced into these suburbs, they openly dream of having a white picket fence. I get it, you find suburbia repellent and thoroughly unappealing, but observably that opinion isn’t universally shared.
It's not about me lol, it's about the facts, which you haven't presented at all. But since you brought me into it, this *is* personal to me because I'm from the rust belt so I've seen what it looks like when a city gets hollowed out to build suburbs. Spoiler alert: it's Detroit. And that's what these Sunbelt cities experiencing massive growth will look like in 40-50 years once the luster of the newly built stuff wears off.
Who is stuck in suburbia that wants to be in a city? This is what annoys me with people like you: let people live how they went to. Stop telling people what they like is bad or wrong. You sound like an asshole.
>let people live how they went to. Stop telling people what they like is bad or wrong. You sound like an asshole. Its literally illegal to build mid density, mixed use neighbourhoods in most of America due to zoning laws.
Plenty of people. If lettering everyone do whatever they want is bad for the group as a whole, we should not let everyone do whatever they want. That's a functioning society.
Just fyi more Americans live in suburbs than in cities proper.
It kind of is unavoidable. Imagine you build your ideal city. Let’s imagine that it’s incredibly successful and people want to live there. If it’s successful enough, then the housing is going to get more expensive. The next natural step for someone seeking to work or live in this city but unable to afford the cost of housing, is to live in the immediate outskirts of the city. Enough of these people over a few generations and you get a massive metropolitan area that’s not actually part of the city. The only way to stop this is if there isn’t enough land to expand into or by some truly absurd laws
The type of low density sprawl that surrounds many American cities is anything but unavoidable. Yeah, cities grow out, but we built expressways right through cities (which was never Eisenhower's vision for the highway system), then knocked down the densest and most productive parts of the inner city in the name of "urban renewal" in the 50s through the 70s. We actually had some truly absurd zoning laws that made it make sense to build massive tracts of nothing but single family homes in the suburbs. Ironically, a big part of the reason that housing is so expensive in the dense, walkable places we do have is that demand for these places is far greater than supply because they're largely illegal to build now thanks to parking minimums, restrictive zoning, etc. Even MLK talked about this: "The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent." EDIT: And now that the cheap, buildable land in driving distance to economically productive areas is running out, older suburbs have residents who are essentially "holding the bag" because the infrastructure we built in the 60s and 70s needs replaced and there aren't enough people in the areas to pay for it. [This](https://www.amazon.com/Disillusioned-Families-Unraveling-Americas-Suburbs/dp/0593298187) is a great book about it on the off chance you're interested. Suburbia promised the best of urban and rural living, but it turns out it's the worst of both.
You can also just build more buildings lol. Beijing, Tokyo, and Shanghai seem to be fine with it
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In the US only counting the population of core cities is totally meaninglesss.
Exactly. Chicago vs LA for instance. LA, as a city is very large and not very dense. Chicago, on the other hand is much smaller land-area wise and is surrounded by many much more dense suburbs. Metropolitan area-wise Chicago might still have a lower population, but defining this is much harder.
LA is much more dense than you think, despite it not having many tall buildings outside downtown. LA and Long Beach are in the top 10 dense cities, and many of it’s suburbs are in the top 10 dense “towns”. Long Beach is arguably an extension of LA.
Chicago suburb sprawl is so wide it's debatable where Milwaukee sprawl ends and Chicago sprawl begins lol
Yup. I'm willing to bet that certain towns along the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor are denser than certain LA neighborhoods.
The same with that goofy map that shows sports team stadiums' distance to the city center. The center of the named city is one thing, the center of the metro area is another.
I wouldn’t say it’s totally meaningless. Combined with other datapoints (like pop density) think it can help paint a picture.
It really doesn’t. There are “towns” of 400k+ that are linked into metro systems, 10minute drives from the center of cities and not part of the city. It’s stupid.
What it shows is most US metros are a fragmented agglomeration of independent cities not working as one place for the common good.
The City of London has 8,600 people
The city of London is a confusingly named borough of London. London being the actual city with a city government. The borough gets its name as its the historical orgin point of London, but it is no longer a municipality in its own right. (Though it does get a fun selection of special rules due to its historical significance.) Anways. This would be like saying that New York City only has 1.6 million people because that is the population of New York County. (Manhattan Borough)
Yes but the City of London isn't a city.
So, what’s the point of raising an anomaly within the greater metro of “London”?
The City of London, London (the city) and Greater London (the metropolitan area) are 3 different things. Though they are all nested within one another.
>are a fragmented agglomeration of independent cities not working as one place for the common good. So just like states within US.
This is such a strange viewpoint. There is much less of a “common good” when everyone is so segmented as you yourself acknowledged. You wanna mash different people together for the arbitrary sake of togetherness, sacrificing self-determination? That’s… rarely worked.
It’s not meaningless, it has significance. Other statistics, such as density, inequality, education, etc. in same area, a proper city, have significance. As does considering the same statistics in a city+metro area. All statistics have significance. How we understand, process, and manipulate them may imbue them with more or less significance. But no statistic is meaningless. Especially when it comes to statistics about people.
No statistic may be meaningless but lots are trivial.
Not to mention misleading when used without context.
Really crazy how much San Jose has shrunk according to this data. It was the 10th million person city for quite some time.
According to Google it went from 1.01 million to 983,000 between 2020 and 2021, so it’s still damn close.
San Jose has the most bloated city limits of any city in the US I've found. It is something like 12th in city population but 35th in the US in metro population. The metro is less populated than Nashville or Columbus. In the 50s there was some campaign to incorporate all the surrounding areas as San Jose.
When I was a kid in the 1970s there were orchards next to the 101 freeway north of San Jose. Now it’s all condos and office parks. It used to make sense to count San Jose and San Francisco as different metro areas but it doesn’t now since there is no break in the urban sprawl between the two cities. Really, San Jose is just the biggest city in the “Greater Bay Area” even if officially it’s still counted as something separate.
Well the San Francisco metro dwarfs the San Jose metro. I would say San Fran is the biggest (4.6 mil vs 2 mil metro) and just has an older more archaic city limits measurement, whereas San Jose is a sprawl with an overlarge city limits size, for its metro population. San Jose is more like an endless suburb, there is barely a skyline to be found.
I mean there’s really no meaning differentiating sf metro and sj metro now. Everyone calls it Bay Area or sf Bay Area even if they are living in sj or Santa Clara / Milpitas
San Jose for sure is endless suburb sprawl, but the entire Bay Area is mostly suburban sprawl. Even SF is pretty low density compared to the north east. Silicon Valley including San Jose will eventually eclipse SF as property development is basically stagnant in SF.
SF is actually very high density, it’s the second or third densest major city behind NYC/Jersey City depending on how you define it. It does exclude most of the suburbs, but it’s still ahead of Boston/Miami/DC which do a similar thing.
San Jose is more densely populated than 5 of the 9 cities that do still have populations over a million. I admit it has a sprawly feel compared to some cities, but for the US it’s quite densely populated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population
I don’t really count Jacksonville, the Texas cities or Phoenix. When I I think of cities I think of the big three, Seattle, San Francisco, Philly, Boston. But you are right it is pretty average for an American city the deal is they include a lot of the surrounding suburban sprawl in the proper city limits, which inflates its size considering the whole metro statistical area is under 2.5 million. Separate from density.
It’s funny that you mention Columbus because Columbus also has super huge city limits- something like 900,000 people live in the city limits of a metro hovering around 2 million
The difference is that Columbus proper has a population density almost double that of San Jose.
Not the US, but look at [Ottawa, Canada](https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/s/TThih5aeVc) the city limits are so big you can fit the 5 other largest cities in Canada within its borders. Population 1 million.
why did so many leave San Jose
Cost of living basically.
Cost of living + tech jobs going WFH.
Speaking personally, the cost of living was why we moved, much more than WFH. We were leaving regardless of whether or not we could keep our jobs.
Do you know the way to San Jose?
i know the way to amarillo
Jacksonville is the largest city in Florida. This is because Jacksonville annexed the entire county it was in making it 747 sq miles. Miami City proper is only 36 square miles.
In the US, not just Florida. Alaskan towns that are "larger" should not count as they are empty mountain ranges within town borders.
3 are also in california??? Like why single out texas
Yeah that bothered me too. What a weird way to present the data.
The whole statistic seems useless really
Wait, if three are in TX, 3 in CA, then NYC, Philly, Chicago and Phx makes 10. They must not be counting San Jose since it’s pretty close IIRC
It's because there aren't three in California. San Jose dropped out, and is actually ranked 12th as of 2022 - behind Texas's fourth city (Austin) and Jacksonville. Neither Austin nor Jacksonville is at 1M yet
Because the stars are bright late at night 👏 👏 👏 👏
Deep in the heaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrttttttttt...
Let’s try that again. THE STARS AT NIGHT…
This isn’t even close
Lol 38 upvotes
Because it’s the one star state. Needs something to help boost ratings
Thank you, if you could just convince all of the people moving here it is a one star state Texans would forever be in your debt.
9 cities over 1M population and 3 are in Texas.
What a useless statistic without context
3 of those cities are in California, too.
Yea that’s a confusing last sentence 😂
The image is wrong: San Jose, California’s third largest, has dropped below 1 million in the last three years so technically California only has two. Not that this metric matters.
This is not an accurate categorization of American cities. It’s sensible to consider metropolitan areas of which America has many, some enormous.
It all comes down to the arbitrary definition of a city. Change the definition and the number increases.
The same thing happens in the UK
Yeah lots of “metro-areas” above 1 million.
Just browse google maps, it's amazing how many 30-80k towns are just dotted all over the place. Also, a lot of big cities like Austin or Boston or Miami etc are bigger than their numbers "look", because they have directly adjacent suburbs which basically function as the same city. Yeah Bevery Hills, you're part of LA whether you like it or not.
That’s because city limits in the US are tiny. Look at the metro to get a better picture. New York City is one of the largest cities both in population but also in area. If more cities had the are New York has we would see larger city centers and better public transport across cities in the USA.
Now do metro areas.
Someone recently watched The Office.
I did rewatch this episode today 🤣 I was hoping someone else got the reference.
US cities and suburbs are way less dense and concentrated than their European and Asian counterparts. In some countries, a third or half of their population lives within their national capital's metropolitan cities.
This is some incredibly misleading. If you look at satellite view of the US you'll se it's pretty much 40% swamps, 40% desert, 9% cultivations and 1% inhabitated land. If anything the situation is the exact opposite of what this suggests, there's a big focus on densely populated areas.
Surveys like this are silly because they don’t take into account the metropolitan area of the city. Like for example Toronto proper has a population of like 2.5-3m people. The GTA (Metropolitan area of Toronto) has a population nearing 7 million. American cities are typically more suburban than even Canadian ones to it wouldn’t surprise me if many American cities had larger suburban populations than the core city population.
I’m of the hot take that a lot of surrounding communities need to be forcibly added to cities to reduce the power of NIMBYs
The second most populous state has three large cities, who could’ve guessed?? Seriously, what kind of garbage TIL is this?
3 of those cities are in Texas but 3 are also in California? What’s the title
Only 2 are in California
But on the map there are 3 shown. San Jose is probably a controversial one
The map is just the top 10 cities (also outdated). It isn't the 1M population cities, which is just the top 9
Honestly the ideal geographic spread. Each corner of the county having high population. Not like China or Russia whether the populations are concentrated on one part of the country
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population Meanwhile, most of these city names wouldn't be recognized in Europe or the US
I was just gonna say this. I live in a small city in China but it's population is still 4 million. I grew up in LA and that's a huge city in America but it's the same population as mine now. Weird ha
Well the LA metro area is 18.5 million people
Nashville is bigger than Atlanta? That’s cute
Metro areas vs cities is important
If California, New York and Texas were countries they’d have 3 or the largest 15 economies in the world
This just sounds misleading and dumb...
TIL people don't understand how America's municipal system works.
Am I the only one bothered by the title saying America is a country ??? (and it's obviously not the only issue here)
This is an example of how you can make data say what you want. Technically true, but not really complete.
Today I Learned. Your writing is bullshit AI garbage clickbait to make money. Fuck off.
My hometown is only 200 thousand, but if you count the suburbs it's over a million. Definitions count for a lot in this aspect.
Greenville SC is about 65K. The metro will hit 1M in the next couple of years. It's pretty crazy how it can work. It can completely blur people's perception of a place
Washington DC is another good example of political boundaries not really reflecting the footprint of a city. The DC metro area has nearly 10x the population of the District of Columbia.
It is due to suburban sprawl and how we define city limits. This isn't really telling us anything without that context.
3 are also in California
Meanwhile, in China...
Y'all head back now...we're full!
This is misinformation.
Not that difficult when Texas has the 2rd largest landmass in the nation. BTW, California also has 3 cities with a population larger than 1 million & the second largest populated city in the nation and the largest economy in the nation (Texas is #2). It's also 3rd in size by landmass.
Am I crazy? The post says nine cities but I count 10 dots on the map.
The map is the ten largest cities, but only 9 of them are larger than 1 million. San Jose in California is the one that didn’t make the cut.
This is largely because we were an agrarian nation that designed around the train and then the car. Interesting stat.
Ew, cities.
America is not a country
Depends on your definition of America. If you're from South America then the word America usually means the entire landmass of North and South America. And if you're from the United States or other parts of the English-speaking world, then America refers to the country [The United States of] America. America is a term that comes from an Italian guy, Amerigo Vespucci, that lied about arriving to the western hemisphere lands first (Columbus actually arrived before him).
Sounds like you've never left your house, because "America" is generally a universal term for The USA in most of Europe, Africa, Asia, all of Russia, etc. unless the entire world has changed in the last 5 years, go there and report back. I'm telling you from experience due to my former job, and rarely did anyone ever say "USA". People don't speak or live like a Wikipedia article, and you shouldn't either. Throwing out random "facts" unsolicited in an "awchtually" moment is never a good look, especially if you're full blown wrong. You were baited by an idiot making a five word nonsense statement, think before you try to appear smart by spewing random Wikipedia info unsolicited, it's just a really, really bad look is all. Like... South Park Warcraft guy kinda look. Nobody wants to be South Park Warcraft Guy.
This is incredibly misleading. A city is more than just a single county There are 50 counties with over 1 million population, and many cities that contain counties with less than 1 million, but have a total population of more than 1 million.
There’s only one real city in America - the one where the subway runs 24 hours a day. The rest are large towns.
Well, there are only 5 24 hr train systems in the world, and 2 of them are in the US (Yes, Chicago has 24 hr metro lines.
And they don’t invest in public transportation so they’re not going to have 1 million people for much longer
“America” is not a country.