That was twice as fast as London (2.4 per cent), though its rate of growth was nonetheless stronger than New York and Paris. How does Houston compare to a geographic behemoth like, say,London? The most up-to-date stats on this measure come from Demographia, a St. Louis-based consultancy, which every year gathers data on every city with a population of 500,000 or more and ranks it in itsWorld Urban Areas Report. Paris, like San Francisco, is a technically small city within a larger area known as the le-de-France rgion. I'd say Birmingham is more similar to Detroit, a once industrial powerhouse that is suffering due to loss of important industry. If you agree to the use of all profiling cookies, London's urban area is the third most populous in Europe, after Moscow and Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census. In the UK, London is by far our biggest city at 1,572km with Leeds in second place at almost a third of the size but compare that to places like Beijing and Sydney that are each more than 10,000km and the UK capital doesn't seem quite so large. Its 3,769,495 inhabitants as of 31 December 2019 make it the most populous city of the European Union, according to population within city limits. The population of London is just under 8 million and there are quite a lot of the world's cities with much larger populations. To view the complete analysis including tables broken down by industry for each global city, please download Current Issues Note 48 from our website. New York City has over 6,000 high-rise buildings in total, 274 of which are classified as 'skyscrapers', as they stand over 150m tall. The key points from Current Issues Note 48 are: Current Issues Note 48-London in comparison with other global cities, Copyright Greater London Authority 2023. The aim was to come up with a list of areas less arbitrary than existing council boundaries; but that still allowed you to count largely independent but touching cities (Southampton and Portsmouth, say) as independent entities. Try another? However, emerging global cities such as Shanghai and Singapore have seen rates of growth that were twice as fast. We know that people know that, but thanks to an intrepid Reddit user, we now have a succinct visual shorthand for just how big the city really is: Namely, these maps, which overlay the 88 miles of Beltway 8 on top of a number of other major world cities. The Reddit user then shared an album of comparisons in which theyve overlaid an outline of the Greater Sydney area to show just how big the New South Wales capital is. At Barratt Homes, weve created an interactive tool for examining the size of almost thirty UK cities compared to twenty other worldwide locations.