Losses and Discoveries

While there is no shortage of ignorance and indifference, there is no doubt that we have an impact with extinction and new discoveries.

As long as we preserve our old growth forests and wilderness we will also continue to discover new plants.

Built environment

I'm not as convinced by megalopolises. They don't even have to be on a common landmass; if you go wide enough, the Blue Banana contains Manchester and Amsterdam. Exhibit B appears when you realise what 'East Coast' denotes; you may have to refine your search to find an entry on this banal sounding stretch but when you do, you realise they mean our East Coast (and you don't get Europe when you search for 'Green Banana' or 'New Banana')

Anyone whose driven the couple of thousand kilometres covered by this designation will start to think that megalopolis must have a very loose definition. It covers Melbourne-Geelong up to Sydney-Newcastle and on to South East Queensland (SEQ) which links the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast with the capital Brisbane. SEQ has been coined the 200 km city or 'Noosangatta' (Noosa-Coolangatta)

Stan Lee

I got my photo taken with Stan Lee

Mrs Megalopolis

So we've dissected and bisected the single cities and teeming surrounds. We finish at the megalopolis - a clustered network of cities.

Greater Cairo
The Gauteng City Region
The region in Morocco including El Jadida-Casablanca-Rabat-Sale-Kenitra 

Pearl River Delta
Yangtze River Delta  
Bohai Economic Rim 
Central Plain
The central Liaoning city cluster  
Northeastern cities or the Harbin-Changchun Area
Sichuan Basin
Greater Wuhan Megalopolis
Guanzhong
Greater Changsha Metropolitan Region

Taiheiyo Belt

Seoul National Capital Area
Southeast Economic Belt

West Bengal-Parnas-Kolkata-Murshidabad
Indo-Gangetic-Brahmaputra Plain Megalopolis
S. India
Maharashtra
Gujarat

Greater Tehran

Western Java
Central Luzon
Central Thai
Central Java
East Java
Malaya
Sijori
Mekong Delta
Red River Delta

"Blue Banana" (also known as Hot Banana, Dorsal, European Megalopolis or European Backbone)

• Greater London
• Chain of large towns in Northern England and English Midlands
• Rhine-Ruhr
• Flemish Diamond
• The Randstad
• Milan metropolitan area

"Golden Banana" (also known as European Sunbelt or BarceLyon)

• Turin economic region
• Genoa metropolitan area
• Lyon economic region
• Nice metropolitan area
• Toulon metropolitan area
• Marseille metropolitan area
• Montpellier metropolitan area 
• Toulouse economic region
• Perpignan metropolitan area
• Greater Barcelona 
• Valencia economic region
• Murcia-Alicante economic region

"Green Banana" (also known as Central Banana,Young Banana, New Banana, North Poland-Centrope-Adriatic or Vistula-Danube Economic River)

• Centrope
• Krakow metropolitan area
• Ljubljana metropolitan area
• Lodz metropolitan area
• Silesian metropolis
• Tricity
• Warsaw metropolitan area
•  Zagreb metropolitan area

Quebec City - Windsor Corridor

Bajio
Greater Mexico City

Arizona Sun Corridor
Cascadia
Florida
Front Range
Gulf Coast
Great Lakes
Northeast
Northern California
Piedmont Atlantic
Southern California
Texas Triangle

East Coast

Lima-Callou Megalopolis
Rio-Sao Paulo Megalopolis
Expanded metropolitan complex of Sao Paulo

Masses; tired, huddled or otherwise

There are thirty megacities, scaling down from Tokyo at the top to Tianjin at 10.6 million just squeezing in.
The other Japanese megacity is Osaka at fifteenth position with 16.8 million population.

There are five megacities in China, three in India and two in the United States.

Seventeen capitals are classed as megacities; actually I think I miscounted and its eighteen. Hey, if Wikipedia contributors can do it, so can I.

Megacities not mentioned or referenced in this discussion thusfar include Cairo (16.1 million), London (15.5 million), Buenos Aires (14.5 million), Bangkok (14.5 million), Istanbul (13.8 million), Lagos, (13.2 million)  Tehran (13.2 million), Rio de Janiero (12.9 million), Rhine-Ruhr (12.19 million), Shenzhen (11.7 million) and Paris (10.7 million).

Cities still

After the unsettling certification of a city proper, I've been on a search to see what other categories shine a streetlight on built-up areas. Metropolitan areas are difficult to measure but are roughly designated as including the labor market area and the surrounding commute, with the caveat that the surrounding region must be of minimal agricultural focus, and include a large number of commuters into the main urban area.

Despite this sub-sophistry, the most populated metropolitan areas are much the same as the most populated cities, only in a slightly different order. Tokyo is the largest and the two not figured in 'cities with the highest population' are Mumbai (20,748,395) and Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto (19,342,000)

II

Here's a word you don't hear every day: agglomeration. An agglomeration is a large group or pile of different things, but in an urban planning sense, an urban agglomeration is 'the population contained within the contiguous territory without regard to administrative boundaries or commuter flows' according to Wikipedia. So it does not even have the restriction in definition of a 'metropolitan area'

Urban agglomeration	Population
Tokyo		36,933,000
Delhi NCR		21,935,000
Mexico City		20,142,000
New York-Newark		20,104,000
Sao Paulo		19,649,000
Shanghai		19,554,000
Mumbai		19,422,000
Dhaka		15,391,000
Beijing		15,000,000
Kolkata		14,283,000

III

I was going to condense all the population aggregation into one thread but I've encountered a setback: I've seen my Wikipedia source virtually change before my eyes so what you see is a 'before' snapshot. Okay, maybe I won't attempt conurbation but before I go on with the other significant measures, I need to take stock of what changes have been made around me.

Con dense

Geography is not my strong suit but the real reason I haven't heard of any of these cities beside Manila is because they are parts of a larger urban environment. Indeed, many are either in Metro Manila or Bengal. The distribution is either in India or the Philippines, with the number ten entry being the joker in the packed; being in France.

But, if the Hooghly River features in the background in many of these congested regions, clearly the city category differs from that of a discrete metropolis.

Yokohama has 8,500 people per square kilometre it says at one source; elsewhere a scribe opines how it is difficult to measure the population of Tokyo and produces instead a table that shows the prefectures and their respective densities. I can hazard a guess and say that density when compared to the "cities proper" on the list, is not that bad.

Manila is most crowded and has the sixth highest urban population so we know it's in for a Best of Congest award.

One figure that may rock your world - Titagarh has a tiny population teetering between 114 thousand and 124 thousand. Yes, it's in West Bengal with the second highest density of a city proper.

And France isn't a one-off in the tightly packed stakes as the runner-up with 67,047 people per square kilometre is Le Pre-Saint-Gervais.