List of urban areas by population

This is a list of contiguous urban areas of the world ordered according to population as of 2014/2015. The figures here have been taken from Demographia's "World Urban Areas" study.

Demographia defines an urban area (urbanized area agglomeration or urban centre) as a continuously built up land mass of urban development that is within a labor market (i.e. metropolitan area or metropolitan region), without regard for administrative boundaries (i.e. municipality, city or commune). Except in Australia, the authorities use a minimum urban density definition of 400 persons per square kilometer (or the nearly identical 1,000 per square mile in the United States). Demographia uses maps, satellite photographs to estimate continuous urbanization. Demographia also uses small area population data, where available, to match population estimates to urbanized land area. National census authority data are presented in Australia, Canada, France, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Census of India urban agglomerations are not used in some cases because the geographical size of constituent units (municipalities) often includes large rural (non-urban) areas.

Sources for population estimates and land area definitions are coded by letter in the Table below, respectively.

The projected year (2013) population estimate is further calculated from the base year population estimate using population growth rate based upon the United Nations population growth rate with some exceptions.

The estimates are quite different from the list of World's largest urban agglomerations produced by the United Nations that reports inconsistently on urban geographic, despite its reference to agglomerations. This is evident, for example, in Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Seoul and Moscow, where the UN data are for political jurisdictions, rather than urban areas. In other cases, the UN data is for metropolitan area, which are larger than urban areas (such as in Brazil). Finally, the United Nations data is incomplete, excluding some significant urban areas (such as Essen–Düsseldorf in Germany).

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