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This one wasn't easy. First, we had to get a handle on what exactly it means to be the "biggest city." Is it by land area? Is it by population? The former seems a little arbitrary, but the latter might be hard to pin down, especially since once-distinct cities have begun to merge into huge sprawling "metropolitan areas." That said, we did manage to come up with an answer to your question. We used a number of different resources to get a consensus -- everything from Yahoo! to Google to Infoseek, but in the end, we found a reasonable number of sites that agreed on the subject. First, we'll share the main dissenter, The InfoPlease Almanac, which listed Seoul, Korea, as the most populous city in the world. They went on to list Sao Paolo, Brazil, in second place and Bombay, India, in third. We were happy to see their comprehensive list of the 50 most populous cities, but they chose to only count inhabitants of within the actual city limits. Later, as we searched further, it became apparent that most sources prefer to judge "urban areas" rather than "cities proper." Next, we present City Population, an entire site dedicated to "the largest cities in the world." Their
unique Java-powered map illustrates the principal agglomerations of the world, again, using population as the determining factor. They list Tokyo as the largest city, with more than 34 million inhabitants. New York City is second and Seoul third. We also found a fascinating page from Slippery Rock University's Geography Department, titled Supporting Material on Settlements. They offer the most populous cities from 1975 (Tokyo, New York, Shanghai), as well as 1900, 1800, 1700, 1600, 900, and a projection of cities in 2015.
Finally, we stumbled onto a collection of geographic extremes that not only concurs that Tokyo is the world's most populous city, but also offers Australia's Mount Isa as the largest city by area.
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