Which megacities have you seen?

[LAsam]

5 for me! Shanghai or Mexico City will probably be next for me. I've been to Hong Kong which certainly feels like a megacity, but doesn't seem to qualify.

• London
• Los Angeles
• New York
• Paris
• Tokyo

[plinko]

10 for me (sadly the only new one I’ve added since 2006 was London in 2018):
Beijing
Guangzhou
London
Los Angeles
Mexico City
New York
Paris
Shanghai
Shenzhen
Tokyo

[JMKeynes]

Bangkok
Beijing

Buenos Aires
Cairo

London
Los Angeles


New York

Paris
Rio de Janeiro
São Paulo

Tokyo

[mousquet]

Almost everybody claims to have made the trip to Paris, that's what I would expect at first.

Originally Posted by jd3189

Los Angeles, Mexico City, and New York.

Ain't you the guy with some Haitian background who can speak a bit of French? I might be wrong but if I remember well, your username matches something like that in my memory.
You should save some money to make it up here. It would be easier for you if you can speak some French for real.

It doesn't really matter if you're broke. You just need to pay for the flight, then there must be some affordable options for tourists over here.
Also, being an American and an English-speaker wouldn't cause any serious prejudice to you anyway.
I guess others on here, whether from Canada or the US would second this statement.

We're used to host many tourists from anywhere in the world anyway.

[harls]

Only NY and LA.

NY last in 2018, LA in... 1989.

I need to get out more.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Only 5:

Johannesburg
London
Paris
Rio de Janeiro
São Paulo

And outside those, it wouldn't be no other city where near those. Not even above 5 million (I've never been to Belo Horizonte, despite being only 500 km away). Above 4 million than I've visited Porto Alegre, Brasília, Cape Town, Durban, Rome and Berlin.

P.S. I'm always surprised on how a lot of SSPers have visited Brazil.

It's not on the list, because it's weird to call it a "city". However, Rhine-Ruhr is a metropolitan area whose population is 11.5 million.

I've crossed most of it by train (Bochum, Essen, Düsseldorf) and spent a day in Cologne.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by CivicBlues

Yeah, you don't have to be particularly well-travelled, just well travelled in Asia to do well on this list.

Maybe not many on this forum which skews towards vacationing in European and North American destinations.

Yeah, I’ve traveled pretty much all over North America (including Mexico) and Europe, so I check all megacities on those two continents: an unimpressive 5.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by CaliNative

What defines a "megacity"? 10 million+ people in the metro? Many cities that are not " megacities" punch above their population in importance....Chicago, SF, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Seattle-Tacoma, Houston, Dallas-Ft.Worth, Atlanta in the U.S. alone. They are economically more important than some of the cities on the "megacity" list.

The generally accepted definition is urban area of 10 million.

[niwell]

Only 5, but that seems surprisingly average for the SSP crowd!


Johannesburg
London (albeit very briefly)
Los Angeles
Mexico City
New York

[JHikka]

London
New York

LA is on my list soon. Will likely knock off a few of those Chinese cities in due time.

[jd3189]

Originally Posted by mousquet

Almost everybody claims to have made the trip to Paris, that's what I would expect at first.



Ain't you the guy with some Haitian background who can speak a bit of French? I might be wrong but if I remember well, your username matches something like that in my memory.
You should save some money to make it up here. It would be easier for you if you can speak some French for real.

It doesn't really matter if you're broke. You just need to pay for the flight, then there must be some affordable options for tourists over here.
Also, being an American and an English-speaker wouldn't cause any serious prejudice to you anyway.
I guess others on here, whether from Canada or the US would second this statement.

We're used to host many tourists from anywhere in the world anyway.

Yeah, I’m thinking of doing an European trip one of these years. Paris for sure will be a destination. But I’m still working on my French.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by niwell

Only 5, but that seems surprisingly average for the SSP crowd!


Johannesburg
London (albeit very briefly)
Los Angeles
Mexico City
New York

5 definitely seems to be the median!

I'm really surprised at how many people miss Paris (especially the ones who have London; it's already less surprising that someone didn't yet go to Western Europe and thus would be missing both).

I'm also surprised at how many people didn't go to Mexico City. It's very accessible from cheap winter sun beach destinations, and those are not something rare for North Americans like us. I visited it (spent a few days) on a trip that also included plenty of beachtime in the Acapulco area, over the Christmas / New Year's holiday.

I would have bet that my five (NYC-LA, and London-Paris, plus Mexico City as the fifth) would be much more common. I think I'm the only one yet! So far everyone who has five has one of these "obvious ones" (to me ) replaced by a more exotic one.

[lio45]

P.S. US Census Bureau could soon bump most of us to six! (Chicagoland in the eight digits.)

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by lio45

5 definitely seems to be the median!

I'm really surprised at how many people miss Paris (especially the ones who have London; it's already less surprising that someone didn't yet go to Western Europe and thus would be missing both).

I'm also surprised at how many people didn't go to Mexico City. It's very accessible from cheap winter sun beach destinations, and those are not something rare for North Americans like us. I visited it (spent a few days) on a trip that also included plenty of beachtime in the Acapulco area, over the Christmas / New Year's holiday.

I would have bet that my five (NYC-LA, and London-Paris, plus Mexico City as the fifth) would be much more common. I think I'm the only one yet! So far everyone who has five has one of these "obvious ones" (to me ) replaced by a more exotic one.

Yeah, I visited London twice, and on both of them I went to Paris. I'm planning to go back to London in December, and again, I'll spend a couple of days in Paris. I love London, but I'm not a huge fan of Paris. But as it's so close, you must check it.

About Mexico City, one might ask me the same about Buenos Aires. A two hours flight from São Paulo and I've never been there. I've been to Montevideo though, which is basically a smaller version of the Argentinian capital.

Originally Posted by lio45

P.S. US Census Bureau could soon bump most of us to six! (Chicagoland in the eight digits.)

Six? Chicago, Washington-Baltimore, San Francisco... The 6th being Dallas?

Chicago growth has been painfully slowly, and although so close, it might not have reached the 10 million in 2030. San Francisco ten-county region reached 8 million a bit far. And Washington-Baltimore is not a "city" and therefore it would be weird to call it "megacity". Dallas will be at 10 million on 2040 Census or later.

I guess the US will take a while to have another megacity.

[SteveD]

If you start counting US big metros that don't reach "megacity" status, I've been to every one, many times each, and, really pretty much every mid size metro too, for that matter. My job has my flying all over the country, all the time.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Six? Chicago, Washington-Baltimore, San Francisco... The 6th being Dallas?

You didn't get my point

The ones of us who can check five megacities right now would nearly all be able to check six instead of five, with some Census Bureau "creative accounting".

[pdxtex]

Chicago is a mega city. Everyone knows it. CSA population per Wikipedia is 9.986 million. The average attendance of a bears game is 60,000. Assuming only 1/4 of fans traveled from out of state, tadah, 10 million!

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by lio45

You didn't get my point

The ones of us who can check five megacities right now would nearly all be able to check six instead of five, with some Census Bureau "creative accounting".

Got it!

Chicago is such a special city, one of the largest in the world at some point. It would be great to see it crossing the 10 million line. Only 5% growth/decade would suffice. 1990's Chicago, for instance, grew 11%.

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And about the list, Bogotá is not a megacity yet. It's actually still less populated than Chicago. It's around 9 million or so. Lima just crossed the barrier.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by pdxtex

Chicago is a mega city. Everyone knows it. CSA population per Wikipedia is 9.986 million.

that's just the CB's wacky-ass MSA/CSA county mash-up silliness. the chicago CSA now includes nearly 11,000 freaking square miles (bigger than 9 US states!), the vast majority of which is just cornfields and small rural towns.

actual "Chicago" (disregarding municipal borders) is a city of around 8.8M people on ~2,500 sq. miles of land. still huge, mind you, but not a "mega-city", as defined by a 10M+ metro area.

we'll get more precise figures if/when the CB ever decides to release the 2020 UA data.

[Crawford]

I've read the claim that Chicago was the third largest city on earth, in the 1930's. Though I'm sure the data-keeping was terrible back then, and cross-national comparisons are probably pretty junky.

I assume NYC and London were #1 and #2, so that would mean Chicago was larger than Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, Moscow. Not so sure about that. I see 10 million in the Tokyo area in 1930, so Tokyo was almost certainly much bigger. Paris has a pretty huge prewar suburban fringe, so had to be at least comparable to prewar Chicago.