You’ve almost certainly been lied to after Googling how big the world’s cities are. How can it be that Melbourne in Australia has 5 million residents, whereas New York City only has 8? It's been very difficult to compare cities, until now...

Mar 3, 2024 · 4:17 AM UTC

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I put up a mini-site today at citydensity.com/ to help you compare the world’s cities. You can see how many people live near a city, or use my favourite metric: "population weighted density" to get an accurate measure of how dense a city is to live in.
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Thanks for the huge amount of interest! I’ve increased the hosting so the site is back up now.
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Replying to @Jonathan_Nolan_
Is each area ring counting only land, or does the empty water count towards the density in each ring?
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For density you can choose. Population weighted density must include water bodies so that we are always weighting similar sized areas, but if an entire square km is water then it will have a weight of 0.
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Replying to @Jonathan_Nolan_
Often, the boundaries are around political entities ie the City of X, but excluding suburbs and commuter satelites. Its not really a lie, more a definitional issue.
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You're thwarting my clickbait headline :p
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Replying to @Jonathan_Nolan_
An idea is to use this to create an actual size of all the worlds cities. Eg an editorial choice instead of visualization. You start from the center and increase perimeter by 1km at a time, and when it goes below some pop density threshold that's where the city limits are set.
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Replying to @Jonathan_Nolan_
Very interesting! Though I feel like there must be some error wrt Warsaw...
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Replying to @Jonathan_Nolan_
The density of Barcelona is crazy
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Replying to @Jonathan_Nolan_
Try googling the answer for the population of Vancouver it’s impossible
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