Megacity
A city of millions is a city with at least 1,000,000 inhabitants. There are around 500 cities with a population of around 1.6 billion, with an average of over 3 million people per city.
Often, due to their large number of inhabitants, megacities are also metropolises or world cities at the same time , but by no means always. While numerous very large cities, for example in Asia or Africa, have little or no international significance, there are relatively small cities in Europe that are very important in an international comparison of cities (examples are Frankfurt am Main , Zurich or Luxembourg ).
The number of megacities in a country is a possible indicator of the degree of urbanization . Australia, for example, has five megacities (urbanization> 90%) with only 24 million inhabitants, while India , which is over fifty times more populous (over 1 billion inhabitants), has only 24 megacities (urbanization <25%).
The designation of a city as a metropolis of over a million is decidedly arbitrary, since it generally refers to the population of the political-administrative municipality. In most cases, however, the location of city limits does not follow the structural or functional interdependencies within an urban region , but rather the local political balance of power, the reform will of the state authorities or simply chance.
In order to replace the unsatisfactory and statistical distortion of the reference to the administrative urban area with a more objective approach, the agglomeration , i.e. the core city plus suburbs that are closely intertwined with it , is also used as a basis for assessing the number of inhabitants . Although this achieves a better approximation of the actual population of the urban region, it creates the new problem of the objective delimitation of this region. So there are objective criteria to define which suburban communities are to be included and which are not. There are various approaches to this, such as the population density of the entire, built-up or buildable area of the municipality, the traffic connection with the core city or the cohesive development with it.
In the German-speaking area there are currently five cities with a population of over a million ( Berlin , Vienna , Hamburg , Munich and Cologne ) in relation to the administrative urban area . In the 1970s, Cologne was already a metropolis with a population of over a million, but later lost this status again, but has exceeded the one million mark again since the end of May 2010 and is therefore currently the fifth German-speaking city with over a million inhabitants.
In the urban area of Frankfurt am Main there are over a million people during the day, due to the high number of commuters, but the number of people registered as having their main residence is significantly lower.
In relation to the urban region, including the so-called bacon belt , the urban regions of Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart , Düsseldorf , Hanover , the Ruhr area consisting of four core cities and Zurich also have over a million inhabitants in the German-speaking area . These city regions are not to be confused with the much broader metropolitan regions , of which a great many exceed the million mark.
See also
- Big city , mega city - see also Wiktionary: de: mega-
- List of megacities
- List of the largest metropolitan areas in the world
- List of the largest cities in the world (historical)
- List of names for large cities
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cologne is again a real megacity after 1972. At: Welt.de. September 28, 2010, accessed November 23, 2015.