How Big Is A City- Part 2

When you look up largest cities in the world, most rankings will list cities by absolute population size. This would mean that by that measure, Sydney, Australia is larger than Chicago, USA. However, in reality, Chicago is a much, much larger city than Sydney. So why does Sydney rank above Chicago? Because, as stated in my previous “How big is a city” post, cities in the USA are measured much, much differently. Likewise, New York City, USA has a population of 8.5 million whilst Beijing, China has a population of 21 million, but both cities are nearly the same size. So why does Beijing rank above New York? Because the measure of a city is different. In the end, it’s really unfair to rank the world’s cities by size, because of the extreme inconsistencies in how city sizes are measured. But does it really matter at the end of the day? In the real world, I don’t think so. I mean, each jurisdiction which controls a city, or part of a city, will have their own system of measuring their size. It matters to them what their population is, but only as far as their system of measuring it is concerned. Local government jurisdictions will allocated funding, infrastructure and anything else to do with population density based solely on how they measure their city size. How New York city measures its own size and its own population will be how the local government of New York handles its own affairs. Sydney or Athens may decide to use a different system to measure its size, but that’s not really relevant to how New York conducts its affairs. Likewise, if Paris or New York use a different system of measuring their size when compared to Sydney, that’s not the concern of the local governments of Sydney. The local governments of Sydney will distribute their resources according to their system of measurement, independent to that of New York or Paris. But I do wonder if it has any effect on people who work for different local governments when their former local government employer had one system, but their new local government employer has a different system. In either case, in the real world, I wouldn’t say it matters too much. In the world of geography and how humans classify things, however, it matters very much. It’s not very accurate to creating a ranking of city sizes when each city has an extremely different system in how the size is measured. Nonetheless, we do create these rankings, so here we are.