I’m not trying to disagree with the neat-ness of anything here but it’s a little misleading to call Chongqing the most populous “city” in the world. It’s officially classed as a city in Chinese terms, but its land area is larger than Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire combined. I think it would be fair to call it a “megacity” or some other new designation.
Tokyo would like a word
And then New Delhi, then Jakarta, then Shanghai
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This is not to say that China doesn’t have large cities, but comparing city sizes in China to city sizes elsewhere is somewhat-problematic, as China uses a classification system that classifies considerably larger regions as “cities” than do other countries.
Traditionally, China’s provinces are divided into prefectures, which are basically the equivalent of a county in the United States, but due to the urbanization boom authority over these administrative divisions began being granted to the largest city (typically) within their realms – resulting in prefectural-level cities. As of February 2016, China has 293 of such prefectural-level cities, which are in addition to the country’s four provincial-level cities – which are essentially province/city combos.
This pro-urban transition has led to the creation of “cities” which span thousands of square kilometers – albeit much of which is almost invariably still farms, villages, mountains, grasslands or even deserts, which appear to be the polar opposite of anything we know as urban. This has lead to a phenomenon where you can be far out in some seemingly remote, rural area while technically being within the bosom of a city. For example, 2,000 of Shanghai’s 7,000 square kilometers is farmland.
Whereas countries like the U.S. tend to have large metropolitan areas which extend beyond the realms of individual cities, in China there is often the opposite: cities which extend beyond the realms of the metropolis.
Time Magazine once infamously crowned Chongqing the largest city in the world in error. While this provincial-level municipality at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers in central China has over 30 million residents, it’s a “city” the size of the U.S. state of South Carolina. If we look a little closer, we find that only 7.2 million of Chongqing’s residents actually live in city-like areas, as most of it is mountains and forests and small villages.
But China has cities that are even larger than Chongqing. At 191,342 square kilometers and stretching for more than 600 kilometers from east to west, Jiuquan, in Gansu province, is about the same size as New England. While Inner Mongolia’s Hulunbuir ranks as the largest municipality in the world in terms of surface area, coming in at 263,953 square kilometers, or about as large as New Zealand. Contrary to their official destination, these are places of deserts and grasslands, and are definitely not very urban.
