How many cities with a population of more than 5 million have you visited?

[ad hoc]

I'm genuinely humbled to have visited somewhere that Ad Hoc and Balderdasha haven't

I haven't been to either Dudley or Belfast either

[Balderdasha]

I haven't been to either Dudley or Belfast either

Ditto

[Duncan Gardner]

Heh. I was in Ad Hoc's real namesake Birmingham suburb yesterday as it goes.Will let you all know of any planned trip to Baldock or Ashbourne..

Others have noted differing measurements used in B's original list. Stretching things a bit, the ribboned megalopolis centered on Dun Dealgan and Yew Tree City must be close to 5m by now?

[Duncan Gardner]

Quick diversion. South Brum suburbs with silly names

Weoley Castle
Rubery
Lickey
Bournville
Silly Oak

[Balderdasha]

I've gone as far as checking all the remaining Chinese cities on Google maps in the vain hope that I'd forgotten visiting one of them, but I'm pretty sure I haven't.

[Balderdasha]

Looks like we'll have to organise a field trip, then. I would like to go Lahore quite a lot actually.



I was thinking along those lines. Most people have heard of Canton*. But it's true that there are a lot of very large cities in China (and India; eg Surat) that are off the average westerners radar. This is probably down to a mix of general ignorance, changing paradigms in geography education - more focussed on "why" and "how" rather than 'facts' - and a need for most of us oldies to recalibrate. I took the list down to 1 million+ for India as it's somewhere I thought I knew a bit about. I found a few I can't recall hearing about and half a dozen more I couldn't have placed on a map beyond a general "sounds like the east," but I bet I could have named most of the world's cities with more than a million people in 1975.

*Actually, is that true? Most people my age have. Maybe I shouldn't assume...

If we go down to 1 million+ for China, wiki has 102 Chinese cities with more than 1 million people, of which I have visited at least 18.

This guardian article from 2017 lists all the cities bigger than 880,000: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...gger-liverpool

[ChrisJ]

If we go down to 1 million+ for China, wiki has 102 Chinese cities with more than 1 million people, of which I have visited at least 18.

This guardian article from 2017 lists all the cities bigger than 880,000: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...gger-liverpool

Thanks. Of the cities listed there, I've visited 9 (I think - I'd have to find my notebook), the largest being Beijing, the smallest Guilin. I have never heard of more than half of the others.

[Sam]

Puts on pub quizmaster hat

The differing standards as to how to count the population on Wikipedia (and other lists, but Wiki is rather more up front about their existence) are largely down to different countries recording what counts as a 'city' differently (some of the really huge Chinese ones are really more akin to what folk in the UK would think of as a county, apparently, with a mix of distinct urban areas and lots of countryside falling under the jurisdiction of a 'city' government, like saying that the city of Lancashire has a population of 1.2 million), and to differing standards about where to stop counting which, on a list like Balders's OP, isn't always consistently applied – so some count the limits of the city proper, some the limits of the urban sprawl, some the greater metro area (which might not exactly coincide with the 'urban sprawl', some the commuting area, etc. Some might count the daytime population while others count home addresses (I think it's Kyoto whose population doubles during the day because so many people who sleep in houses well outside the city come into it for work; in non-pandemic times almost the same is true of Buenos Aires; the city proper has a population of about 3 million, but it's estimated that roughly another 2 million commute into it each day from the surrounding urban area).

Whenever I'm doing a pub quiz question on city populations I try to be as specific as I can be (without making the question confusing or over long) about which metric is being used. Just asking 'what's the largest city in the world?' is not good practice.

[Sporting]

Interesting post, Sam.

[Sam]

You're far too kind.

[Balderdasha]

While looking at city sizes, I just found this really interesting infographic: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chi...le-population/

I considered putting it on the maps thread but it's not really a map. Do we have an interesting infographics thread?

[slackster]

Of the cities on the list left without an OTF visitor declaration, you can put my name down for Luanda, Baghdad and Lahore. The first two were work trips, whilst I tacked on a tourist weekend to Lahore after visiting Karachi for business.

In total I’ve been to 47 places on that list: some as a tourist, but mostly because I was on in/out business trips. Flogging investment and banking services to central banks and government agencies saw me get around a fair bit.

[Balderdasha]

Of the cities on the list left without an OTF visitor declaration, you can put my name down for Luanda, Baghdad and Lahore. The first two were work trips, whilst I tacked on a tourist weekend to Lahore after visiting Karachi for business.

In total I’ve been to 47 places on that list: some as a tourist, but mostly because I was on in/out business trips. Flogging investment and banking services to central banks and government agencies saw me get around a fair bit.

Thanks, I've added you to those three

[Balderdasha]

This now means that the biggest city without an OTF visitor is Dongguan.

The next city down, Foshan, is a bit of a strange one as, given its sprawl, some sources now say that it has merged with Guangzhou. I've been to Guangzhou, but I haven't been to Foshan.