Home > Largest urban areas of Western Europe

This list was created in order to help solve the problem of widely diverging numbers that are found online, or even on Wikipedia, for the population of European cities. Numbers here have been compiled using a uniform definition and the limits of urban areas have been harmonized as of 2000, so they can be compared with each other. The list was designed in 2000, and figures for 2004 that are presented here have been calculated using the 1990-2000 population growth rate for each city. It is possible that one or two urban areas may have experienced a very different growth pattern since 2000, in which case the figures given here would differ slightly from reality, but this should play only at the margin.

1 Important notes

• This is a list of urban areas, this is not a list of metropolitan areas. Urban areas are contiguous built-up areas where houses are not more than 200 meters apart (discounting rivers, parks, roads, industrial fields, etc.). A metropolitan area is an urban area plus the satellite cities around the urban area and the agricultural land in between.
• The majority of European statistical offices do not have a definition for metropolitan areas, they only define urban areas, therefore it is not possible to give figures for metropolitan areas. Figures for European metropolitan areas than can be found online, such as London 13 million inhabitants, Randstad 7 million, etc., are only rough estimates, and should be taken with a lot of care. France is one of the few countries in Europe that actually define metropolitan areas, and calculate their population. See Aire urbaine for a definition and a list of French metropolitan areas.
• Figures here are accurate, unlike rough estimates of European metropolitan areas than can be found online. However, figures here cannot be compared with figures of AmericaThe word America has several meanings: Geographical and political The United States of America. America a small town in the Netherlands. Amerika a small town in Saxony, Germany America, Cambridgeshire a place in the United Kingdom America North, Central,n metropolitan areas. The Census Bureau in the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in computes metropolitan areas, which are larger than urban areas. The Census Bureau does not compute urban areas, so that it is practically impossible to compare the size of American and European cities, except in the case of a few European coutries such as France where the statistical office computes metropolitan areas.
• Please do not be surprised if you are used to higher figures for the cities listed below. London is frequently listed with 13 million inhabitants, StuttgartStuttgart is the capital of Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany and has about 600,000 inhabitants June 2004 . Overview Stuttgart Germany, capital of Baden-Wurttemberg state (pop. 11 million, 36,000 square kilometers) and the Administrative District of Stuttgart (p is frequently listed with 2.2 million inhabitants, MunichMunich ( German: Munchen ) is the state capital of the German Bundesland of Bavaria. Behind Berlin and Hamburg, Munich is Germany's third largest city with a population of about 1. 261 million ( as of 2003). It is located on the river Isar. History The se with 2 million or more, etc. This is because figures here are only for urban areas, which are smaller than metropolitan areas. Urban areas can be computed by private people or institutions using maps and looking where the built-up area stops. Metropolitan areas, which imply much more complicated definitions (such as the proportion of people in satellite cities working in the core of the metropolitan area), can be accurately computed only by statistical offices, after they have chosen a definition for metropolitan areas, but unfortunately the majority of European statistical offices do not define or compute metropolitan areas.