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Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,029,399 times
Reputation: 11862
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TECHNICALLY sure, that's the 'population of the city', but why is it only Americans seem so hung up about comparing city limit population, when they don't really matter? It is metropolitan areas that matter. Around the world, if you ask someone from almost any country 'what is the population of the city you live in' they will almost always say the size of their metropolitan area. Cities outside the US tend to be more centralized, with a lot of people commuting into the city. A city's downtown size depends on the size of it's commuting area: the area where at a significant percentage of people commute into the city for work, leisure, amenities.etc. Are American cities really THAT de-centralized?
I know there are many cases where many cities have merged together - Baltimore-Washington, or So-Cal, where it's hard to know where one metro begins and where one ends. But still, it's ridiculous to treat San Francisco as a city of 700,000, on the level of I don't know, Birmingham, Alabama or something. One should treat San Francisco as a metropolitan area of at least 4 million, or else speak of the Bay Area conurbation with it's 7-8 million people.
I think we usually treat cities' sizes based on their metro areas and not their populations. Plus, they usually line up well - not perfectly, but very close. For example, San Francisco is the 13th largest city, the 11th largest metropolitan area, and the 6th largest combined statistical area (meaning that commuting patterns are not necessarily that strong everywhere.)
There are of course exceptions - a few cities have everything in their city limits, or a few cities have very little in their city limits - but usually it evens out.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,029,399 times
Reputation: 11862
It's interesting, I remember looking at my own world atlas. Perth, was given a symbol for 'over 1,000,000' people but San Francisco fell into the 500,000 - 1,000,000 category. That can't be right, I thought, San Francisco has to be a lot bigger/influential than Perth. Then I looked up the metro stats and found out how the city limits were defined, and it made sense.
Perth's officially 'city limits' are the statistical metropolitan area, an area which covers almost all over the metropolitan area. I believe this is the area used to measure the population.
I think in general people do refer to metro areas, and most probably don't know a lot of "city" populations beyond their own region.
On here, people tend to always take the MSA/CSA for size affect, but I have seen people switch to city proper population when it makes their home town look better...
The worst I've personally experienced this "criteria changing" was with a little genius out of San Jose. His form of trash talking against St. Louis (NHL forum during the first round of the playoffs this year) was to try and tell me San Jose has over 7 mil people and St. Louis is a tiny farm town of 300,XXX something people...
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,029,399 times
Reputation: 11862
^ I've seen enough people argue that 'city limits' matter most to like you say 'boost' their own city.
Of course no one really believes Jacksonville is more significant than SF which goes to highlight how ridiculous the whole business is.
I've also heard people think SJ is 'more important' in the Bay Area than SF because it's larger.
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