HOW DO ALL THOSE PEOPLE FIT IN TOKYO?
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In 2009, the number of people living in urban areas surpassed the number of people living in rural areas, and the world is not looking back. As more and more of the world's population has packed into and around cities, some staggeringly populous urban areas have arisen. A new data visualization from Redditor Dadapp94 shows the world's 50 biggest urban areas by population, each illustrated with a to-scale outline of the geographic area that all those people fit into.

 

As tends to happen when you start comparing cities, there is some disagreement in the comments on Reddit over whether this visualization really reflects the population of these 50 urban areas. Dadapp94 used the French Wikipedia version of a list of the biggest urban areas, which uses slightly different sources from the English language version. Regardless of which source you use, Tokyo is definitely the most populated urban area in the world, despite occupying a smaller geographic area than many of the other cities on this list. But the New York metropolitan area also deserves a shoutout for being the biggest metropolitan area in the world by landmass — not that we're biased, or anything.

[Via Reddit]

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