Biggest European Cities: 1800-2018 May 8, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
Messing around with numbers for the great European cities over the last two hundred years: I’m not interested so much in the biggest cities as the capitals of the most important countries. Can these be taken as barometers for the successes and failures of their countries?
A few things stand out. First, growth is constant in all cases.
Second, only Paris and London have really been in the race to be the greatest European city; though Moscow, with its Soviet hangover, should be included for contemporary Europe. London has traditionally, of course, cornered finance and Paris culture.
Third, London’s population is a useful measure of British decline and London’s dominance seems to have been relatively slighter since the 1950s.
Fourth, note Rome’s and Madrid’s failure to grow decisively in the late nineteenth century; even after 1861 for Italy.
Most strikingly for me is how difficult this exercise is to carry out for 1950 and particularly for 2017. As regular readers will know strangehistory is very skeptical about using population figures from before 1800, though this blogger has occasionally and guiltily rolled them out. The biggest problems with these more recent numbers is not their head-counting accuracy, but rather, for 1950 and 2017, the real boundaries of the city, what might be called the contado. For example, the population of Paris in 2017 is estimated to be around two and a quarter million: but the Paris metropolitan area, including the banlieues and commuter towns, rises to over ten million, and perhaps considerably more. That should beat out a Greater London (note the capital letters, a municipal authority) at 8.5 million: but if you include all urban areas in its conurbation London may be as great as thirteen million. I’ve put thirteen million above, for the childish reason that I just can’t stand Paris winning out… Any better ways to count: perhaps the ideal figure would be all the areas that can be commuted from: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
