This is easy to look up, so see if you can get it without googling.
Of the world’s largest cities by population, how many of the top 10 are in the United States? How many of the top 50?
My guess without Googling: one. And that is the city proper and not the overall metropolitan area. If metropolitan area is considered, my guess is two.
Source I’m using defines by city proper, metro area, and urban area. You’re right that it makes a difference (though your guesses are wrong). The wiki page is ranked by city proper, so that’s what I was using, but it can be re-sorted. Some cities outside the US have no info on metro area, so the only real comparison is city proper and urban area.
I was thinking the same.
I guess none in the top 10, and two in the top 50.
You are closest. None in top 10 based on city only. NYC is 11th. 3 in top 50.
Looking at the whole urban area, NYC is 5th in the world.
I remember not that long ago, Mexico City was biggest in the world, but they’ve dropped to 5th.
I really thought London would have been higher.
Probably, at one time. Asia is bigger than we realize most often.
Also, most are not in what I would consider “western”, “first world” nations.
When I was growing up, Detroit was the 5th largest city in the US (1.9 million in the1950 census) and people asked if it would overtake Philadelphia to be 4th. Of course, what people didn’t realize then was that Detroit had already begun losing population, and the numbers dropped every count since then down to 639K in 2020 (#27). If the trends continue, Nashville and Louisville will pass them soon. If Albuquerque’s growth wasn’t geographically limited, we could pass them.
I heard recently that Dallas will soon surpass Chicago. Texas cities have lots of room to grow. The Freakonomics podcast did a couple of episodes on Dallas recently.
I wonder how long until the Dallas megalopolis reaches the OK border. A few years back we visited friends in McKinney and the traffic there was congested.
According to this list, Nashville already has, as have a few other cities.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities
In the podcast, they were talking to people from one of the suburbs. It’s grown from something like (going from memory) 6K people to 200k in about 20 years.
Smaller scale, but my house in the KC burbs was farmland when we bought our first house in 2001.
Similar experience here. We moved here in 1999 and the population extended 4-5 miles west of us. Beyond that, nothing but desert. Today, houses as far west as one can see. That is mostly Rio Rancho, a population of 48-50K then and 102K in 2020 and still growing.
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