Talk:Urban areas in Europe

Moscow in the list?

Never knew this city is in Europe. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:200:2E02:990:F9EA:59DF:9D12:5F86 (talk) 18:46, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Ankara

Ankara should be on this list

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs provides estimates for the population of urban areas in 2015:

The 30 Largest Urban Agglomerations Ranked by Population Size at Each Point in Time, 1950-2030, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2014 revision, Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved 2015.

Rob984 (talk) 16:53, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Reliability of Citypopulation.de

The consensus at Talk:List_of_metropolitan_areas_in_Europe#Is_Citypopulation.de_really_WP:RS was that this is not a reliable source. As such, I think it should be removed here as well, even though it does at least deal with urban agglomerations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TritonsRising (talk • contribs)

The City Population source isnt even about urban areas but metropolitan areas. For example that urban agglomeration population for London is much higher than the one listed at Greater London Urban Area. I will remove it unless anyone is opposed. Eopsid (talk) 15:53, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

City Population is agglomerations. But in some instances agglomerations are equal to metro area or conurbations. Each city has a note on methodology. UN is far less reliable. They don't provide any information on methodology, because they don't use any. Most UN numbers are administrative-territorial units (what some call incorrectly call city proper), not urban area (agglomerations). Elk Salmon (talk) 11:38, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

The very nature of the urban agglomeration definition makes it quite difficult to get reliable data. Since official statistical information are most likely following the administrative borders, and the main intent of the agglomeration definition is to purposefully ignore those borders. So, the numbers are probably more likely to be found in research papers rather than in official documents? The Copernicus programme has some data on urban population, using kilometre grid, but provides summarized population counts not for urban areas, but only for the very high population density "cores" of the urban areas. Probably because that would be harder to delimit? Citypopulation.de seems to do an OK job with what data is available. While UN population data is probably more reliable, it has often very little in common with an urban area delimitation. Dżamper (talk) 14:49, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

Merge

I noticed that this page already indicates which countries are in the European Union. It seems logical that merging Urban areas in the European Union into this article would make sense. Logoshimpo (talk) 09:37, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

agreed ~2025-36333-31 (talk) 05:21, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Logoshimpo, any thoughts on how this should be merged? The European Union article seems to have more information on each urban area that the Europe article doesn't accommodate. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:09, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Urban areas in the European Union only lists urban areas over 500,000 inhabitants but this list lists all entries. In other words, this list is exhaustive and comprehensive. There is a section of Important notes which might have pertinent material which could be retained. I haven't read all the citations and both articles thoroughly so I don't think if I were to merge the articles that the outcome would be satisfactory. Logoshimpo (talk) 07:21, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

• Urban areas in the European Union lists urban areas over 500,000 inhabitants in EU only, and features 70 entries.
• This article (Urban areas in Europe) lists urban areas over 1 million in Europe (EU and non-EU), and features 69 entries.

I wouldn't say that one of them is more complete than the other. Furthermore, since various definitions of what an urban area is exist, I wonder whether any such list could ever be called "exhaustive and comprehensive". Dżamper (talk) 18:59, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

What sort of definitions do you have in mind? I'm aware of functional area and the nordic countries have their own definition of urban area as defined by their statistical bureaus. I think we could merge the articles together if european union is treated as a section. Logoshimpo (talk) 11:46, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

Functional areas are areas that are functionally dependent on a city. Urban areas are areas that are connected with a city by a contiguous urban fabric. So, two related but different and parallel concepts. But even for the definition of the urban area alone, there will always exist different delimitation methods of how big that area is. What is the threshold to be considered urban. Are parks, industrial areas, waterbeds "contiguously urban", etc. And actually, there is currently no source provided which would do that comprehensively. The UN list doesn't (has definitions that vary on country-by-country basis due to lack of data), neither does the EU (Eurostat has only functional areas, Copernicus could, yet provides figures only for "(dense) cores (of) urban areas", not the whole urban areas). Demographia is IMO the closest, but is not generally considered a truly reliable source. Dżamper (talk) 17:09, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

Oppose for now - I took a quick look at the articles, I think they use different statistical bases that would be difficult to merge well, also it looks like the data in the EU article is more up to date than proposed destination article, but I'm not sure if more recent data is available for all of the non-EU cities. ScrubbedFalcon (talk) 11:05, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

Does my reply to Dżamper change your mind? Logoshimpo (talk) 11:47, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

You mean having a separate section for the EU data? If that was the proposal then I wouldn't see how the merge would serve readers better than having a separate article. I thought the purpose of the merge in this case was to eliminate WP:OVERLAP, but if the data is different enough that it needs its own section, I think its clearer for readers to just have the separate articles. I agree that there is some overlap in these lists, but I think it needs to be clearer how they would be merged without making the information difficult to parse. ScrubbedFalcon (talk) 11:56, 18 March 2026 (UTC)