<story><title>The City States of Europe</title><url>http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/the-city-states-of-europe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lispm</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the Megacity is a good model and here in Germany we certainly don&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;lack it&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s nothing we desire. Germany is currently happy NOT to have cities like London, Paris, Tokyo, New York or similar.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the future for those Chinese Megacities? I&amp;#x27;m not sure we see a linear&amp;#x2F;whatever development of them over the next decades. Already huge cities like Beijing or Delhi (India) are having huge problems (waste, energy, water, air quality, and all kinds of pollution, transport, ...) which easily could lead to very nasty scenarios.&lt;p&gt;The medium sized large cities (1-3 million people) usually offer better quality of life, especially if there is enough space around them.&lt;p&gt;If we look at Germany, there are competing concepts like the &amp;quot;Metropolitan Region&amp;quot; (the region with a big city or a city landscape as its center) and the &amp;quot;Region&amp;quot; (sometimes the Bundesland&amp;#x2F;State, sometimes a bit smaller). The region is defined by cultural&amp;#x2F;political&amp;#x2F;economic aspects - it could lack a big city, but have a cultural identity, which provides the bonding. The large cities were growing, not because of foreign migrants, but because they provided the better infrastructure and cultural life + the young east germans were looking for work after the fall of the &amp;#x27;Wall&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;At the same time in western Germany quite a bit of the economy has been driven by medium sized companies sometimes in remote&amp;#x2F;rural areas in small towns. Some of them are no longer medium sized, but kept the spirit of one. They show that it is possible to deliver high-tech to a global customer-base from small cities. Just take &amp;#x27;Herzogenaurach&amp;#x27; in southern Germany, a small town with just over 20k people. It hosts three large companies: Adidas (&amp;gt; 10bn Euro revenue), Puma (3bn Euro revenue) and Schaeffler (&amp;gt;10bn Euro revenue).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>&amp;gt; What&amp;#x27;s the future for those Chinese Megacities? I&amp;#x27;m not sure we see a linear&amp;#x2F;whatever development of them over the next decades.&lt;p&gt;Individual cities like Beijing and Shangai are peanuts compared to what is coming. I don&amp;#x27;t know if you are aware and if that is what you were referring to with &amp;quot;Chinese Megacities&amp;quot;, but the Chinese government is working to tightly integrate larger regions. Some very explicitly directed from the central government, some thanks to city&amp;#x2F;province level cooperation.&lt;p&gt;E.g. the Bohai Economic Rim[1] include cities like Beijing and Tianjin. Currently about 66 million people in the whole area. There&amp;#x27;s work underway to tie them together with high speed rail, more highways, combining communications networks, government structure etc. Some projections suggest that all of the Bohai Rim will merge into a megacity with 250m+ people over the next few decades.&lt;p&gt;Then there&amp;#x27;s the Pearl River Delta [2], which includes Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macau, Shenzhen, Dongguan and a number of other large cities, and which is headed in the same direction. Depending on how you count, the PRD is already the largest metropolitan area in the world with the number of people ranging from somewhere around 63million people and up to 120 million.&lt;p&gt;Then there&amp;#x27;s the Yangtze River Delta [3], which may compete with PRD for the largest population - the main contention is whether the YRD is one metropolitan areas or series of adjacent ones - it&amp;#x27;s not as tightly integrated as the PRD. Yet. But it has 140 million inhabitants, and includes cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou etc.&lt;p&gt;Chances are all three of these will in practice merge. Whether or not they will be unified to the point of being governed like cities is another matter (they are large enough that currently they straddle multiple provincial boundaries.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bohai_Economic_Rim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bohai_Economic_Rim&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Pearl_River_Delta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Pearl_River_Delta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Yangtze_River_Delta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Yangtze_River_Delta&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The City States of Europe</title><url>http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/the-city-states-of-europe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lispm</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the Megacity is a good model and here in Germany we certainly don&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;lack it&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s nothing we desire. Germany is currently happy NOT to have cities like London, Paris, Tokyo, New York or similar.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the future for those Chinese Megacities? I&amp;#x27;m not sure we see a linear&amp;#x2F;whatever development of them over the next decades. Already huge cities like Beijing or Delhi (India) are having huge problems (waste, energy, water, air quality, and all kinds of pollution, transport, ...) which easily could lead to very nasty scenarios.&lt;p&gt;The medium sized large cities (1-3 million people) usually offer better quality of life, especially if there is enough space around them.&lt;p&gt;If we look at Germany, there are competing concepts like the &amp;quot;Metropolitan Region&amp;quot; (the region with a big city or a city landscape as its center) and the &amp;quot;Region&amp;quot; (sometimes the Bundesland&amp;#x2F;State, sometimes a bit smaller). The region is defined by cultural&amp;#x2F;political&amp;#x2F;economic aspects - it could lack a big city, but have a cultural identity, which provides the bonding. The large cities were growing, not because of foreign migrants, but because they provided the better infrastructure and cultural life + the young east germans were looking for work after the fall of the &amp;#x27;Wall&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;At the same time in western Germany quite a bit of the economy has been driven by medium sized companies sometimes in remote&amp;#x2F;rural areas in small towns. Some of them are no longer medium sized, but kept the spirit of one. They show that it is possible to deliver high-tech to a global customer-base from small cities. Just take &amp;#x27;Herzogenaurach&amp;#x27; in southern Germany, a small town with just over 20k people. It hosts three large companies: Adidas (&amp;gt; 10bn Euro revenue), Puma (3bn Euro revenue) and Schaeffler (&amp;gt;10bn Euro revenue).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jychang</author><text>Germany has only 80 million people, however. And the cities in Germany are all spread out around the country.&lt;p&gt;China has 1.3 billion people, mostly clustered on the east coast. Building megacities is basically mandatory. According to Wikipedia [1], a &amp;quot;medium sized city&amp;quot; with population 1 to 3 million people, in China, would be among 169 other cities. There are 73 cities with a population over 3 million, in 2010. A city with exactly 1 million people would be rank 242 in China... the city (town?) ranked 242 in population in Germany would be the city&amp;#x2F;town of Eisenach, population 42,700. That&amp;#x27;s a seriously small city, or about half the population of Mountain View, California.&lt;p&gt;And these numbers are from the 2010 census- according to some sources, China&amp;#x27;s population has increased by 80 million people from 2010 to 2016. That&amp;#x27;s the size of one entire Germany.&lt;p&gt;The comparison here between cities in Germany vs cities in China isn&amp;#x27;t exactly fair.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;List_of_cities_in_China_by_population_and_built-up_area&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.citymayors.com&amp;#x2F;gratis&amp;#x2F;german_topcities3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.citymayors.com&amp;#x2F;gratis&amp;#x2F;german_topcities3.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>