Heard exactly that, including the Leipzig part, every year for the 5 years I lived there 10 years ago.
Berlin is the biggest city in continental Europe, there's a lot of everything and there'll always be hidden little nooks.
Berlin is the biggest city in continental Europe, there's a lot of everything and there'll always be hidden little nooks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_European...
More people live in Munich's metropolitan area (i.e. where underground and overground take you) than Berlin. Still, Berlin feels like a proper city and Munich like a large village.
Berlin vs Munich is where your metric (people who live inside city boundaries) works to describe the metropolitan effect.
Paris, on the other hand, is on another level entirely. When you travel from Paris to Berlin, Berlin feels like a small town. And here, the metric of people who live inside city boundaries just doesn't describe the feeling of the cities at all.
Often there are cultural aspects at play too. I live in London. I also live in Croydon - it'd be one of the largest cities in the UK in its own right if it was separate to London (and on more than one occasion the council has tried to make that happen). Most of the borough is part of the same urban area, but some are fairly well separated. Several parts of the borough are really separate towns, separated not just from London but from Croydon by "relatively rural" land (by our standards), with their own town centers, train stations, and culturally distinct.
All of this is within the administrative city limits of Greater London ("London" doesn't really exist as an entity of its own - and before anyone else says City of London, that's one tiny constituent part of Greater London - nobody means City when they say London)
So when you say Berlin, everything might be within city limits, when you say London, odds are you wouldn't think of every part within the actual city limits as part of it, nor even a city, but the Greater London urban area includes tendrils extending beyond Greater London too that nobody other than perhaps extra audacious real estate agents would call London. When you say Paris, odds are you might include some parts beyond the formal city limits but very unlikely the entire urban area.
Even then, you won't even get people living each place to agree where the line goes.
For this discussion (cultural centers of Europe), Greater Paris, Greater London and Berlin (they have roughly similar areas) are what you want to compare, and Berlin is clearly the smallest one population-wise out of these three (and it's not even close).
If we want to shorten the name of City of London, the short form is the City, not London. The only people who ever calls City by the name of London is people who have just learnt of the oddity.
Greater London makes up the formal boundaries of London. It's the legal and administrative boundary, and the city limits of London. Unusually, unlike the city limits of many other cities, you'll find plenty of people including people who live here who not quite consider the outer parts to be part of London. People where I live sometimes still consider it part of Surrey even though it's been part of London since 1965.
There are forests and agricultural areas almost entirely separating parts of the borough I live in from the rest of London.
Yet in other areas, the Greater London urban area expands well past what anyone would call London, including e.g. entirely separate towns in other counties, like Watford in Hertfordshire, Gravesend in Kent, Epsom and Guildford in Surrey.
So yes, these comparisons are tricky but that is the point.
E.g culturally, London is likely reasonably described as smaller than it's city limits, while indeed some other cities are often larger than them, but rarely as large as the urban area they are within. It's extremely common for towns on the outskirts of large cities to have their own separate identities and not be considered part of the adjoining city, but still form part of the same urban area.
Depending on what you want to compare and which cities you are comparing, different measures will be more or less appropriate, and may require different considerations.
This seems almost obnoxiously confusing when talking online to people from all over the world.
[And, yes, this means there was a 14 year period when the UK had a capital without a government, nor indeed any administrative unit - effectively "(Greater) London" as a political and administrative entity didn't exist during that period -, largely for political reasons - Thatchers government was strongly at odds with the then particularly left wing Greater London Council]
But really, the reason for contracting City of London to "City" rather than London is to minimise confusion, because it means London fairly unambiguously, though not entirely, refers to Greater London.
You can have these differences within one city as well, on the district level or even individual streets.
Paris has the specificity of having small limits for the city proper but it does not make sense to use that metric for comparison because nowadays the city only stops at the administrative limits for adminsitrative purposes and nothing else. You won't even notice you've crossed the limit if not for the ring road.
In fact, Moscow is also larger than Berlin however you look at it we we're talking about "continental Europe" (which I take as a way to exclude London, which is also larger than Berlin...).
It might well still be the biggest in the EU if you drew limits based on what people considered part of the city - I don't know - but it certainly would not be as big as its urban area.
In fact, I'd argue you're unlikely to find any major city anywhere in the world where most people would agree that every part of the outer boundaries of the urban area are part of "the city" (or even "a city"; parts of urban areas will still often be considered fairly rural by those who live there or in the nearby city) even in a loose colloquial or cultural sense. Even coming close would be exceedingly rare. This because the ways urban areas are designated by design tends to include commuter regions far outside, with their own identities, and often very separated from the biggest city in the urban area.
So while going by city limits will be misleading, so will going by urban area. Unfortunately, no single metric will be accurate for these things.
I live outside of London, howver you define 'London', but still in London's area of influence considering how many people commute into London from here every day.
At the same time it's specifically meant to be aligned to OECD and Eurostats definition of a Functional Urban Area, which is a definition meant to ensure comparable statistics across countries, which neither the "old style" urban nor metropolitan area terms provide...
Which really just goes back to the main point that you can get pretty much whichever result you want here unless you narrow it down to the specific criteria that actually matter to you...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_in_...
Great, then we don't need to hear from these people. They don't need opinions or view points about things they were never intersted in, never learned about, and couldn't be bothered to remember.
"Europe" is very commonly used as a synonym for the EEA or even just EU many places today, no matter how incorrect that is.
The term was very specifically "Continental Europe".
> The term was very specifically "Continental Europe".
And "continental" in Europe very often is just used as a "but not the UK" modifier.
You can argue about the correct meaning all you want, but it is entirely irrelevant to whether or not that is how it was actually being used.
I don't care what you think about me.
Also comparing city populations within city limits is exactly being too pedantic, because Paris is one example where the administrative city is much smaller than the real city.
There's a ring of sbahn commuter rail around the center. From east to west that's about 16km and from north to south about 10km. Anything inside that could definitely be considered as the center. Walking east to west would take about three hours or so. You'll pass through a lot of interesting neighborhoods, each with their own little centers. You'll pass lots of landmarks. The former east and west berlin "centers" are about 9 km apart. A lot of the traditional landmarks and hotspots are spread out throughout that zone. And then you have a lot of gentrified spots that are becoming hotspots in their own right.
I use the word center loosely of course because there really is no such thing in Berlin. It's all spread out over a huge area. There are probably about well over a dozen areas that can lay claim to being a center of something. And frankly, most of the interesting bits are outside of what the tourists flock to these days.
Outside the ring, the city continues in pretty much all directions for quite some distance. And some of those areas are quite nice as well. But most would not consider that the center. I've lived here for about fifteen years and there are huge parts of the city that I've simply never even been to because it would take like an hour plus to get there and there isn't much in terms of landmarks, etc. to draw me there.
Technically Berlin is actually a city state (within the federation of Germany) that includes the capital and a few suburbs. Total population is still smaller than it was before WW II (3.5M people vs 4M people then). So there's a lot of open space, huge parks, two decommissioned airports (Tempelhof, Tegel), etc. all within the city limits. Tempelhof is huge. About 2km by 2km of open space in the middle of a big city with two decomissioned runways. It was the site of the cold war air bridge. You have Kreuzberg to the north, Neuköln to the east and Alt Tempelhof just outside the ring on the south west side. And that's just one corner of the city. All in former west Berlin.
The population is growing for the last decades at a pretty decent rate (about 50K new people per year or so). But it will take some time to catch up to pre WW II era levels.
"It use to be about the music"
I remember hearing this 25 years ago.
Of course, what happens is that you get people who have been going to these things for 10 years and the novelty has worn off along with being 10 years older.
Most fun activities are better when you are 10 years younger with no expectations.