Talk:List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits

message: The city of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. For instance is municipality of Frederiksberg located as an enclave with 100.000+ inhabitants whithin Copenhagen municipality. The urban area consists of a dozen municipalities and has 1,2 million+ inhabitants. While f.i. Berlin city limits covers agricultural areas and forests. I removed Copenhagen from this list since the "city limits" was interpreted as the municipality of Copenhagen only (which only covers around 75 km2). No incorporations of new territory to Copenhagen municipality has been done since 1902 ! I suggest we make a list of European cities based on urban area insted (not to be confused with the list of metropolitan areas) This list isn't comparable. Different standards between the different countries makes this list disenlightning for our readers Boeing720 (talk) 04:29, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't disagree with any of that, but for a list of this kind to serve any purpose, it has to build on a source. That source is the Eurostat report about population figures in cities in the EU. I don't think it's perfect, and there are other errors apart from the one you list. Still, we cannot randomly delete or add figures as we want (see WP:OR). If you have an alternative source to use for the article, I'm sure that would be well received as long as it fulfills WP:RS.Jeppiz (talk) 13:09, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: That Eurostat source is from 2003–2006, making it clearly outdated. Besides, the link appears to be dead in any case. --Jaakko Sivonen (talk) 21:50, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cities without city limits 

message: The municipality of Brussels has 177,849 inhabitants. Using the population of the Brussels Region is an error. I know what many people would say: there is the case of Greater London. But this is an error:
* if in the British case the administrative structure is not standardized, this is not the case of counties in continental Europe adopting the Napoleonic administrative pyramid. In these cases (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland....) the commune (comune, gemeinde...) is the municipality without doubt and, more, without exceptions. 
* using the Region to identify Brussels is an error because the Region has not the powers and the role of a municipality, but of a US state. The Brussels Region has the same powers of Flanders region or Wallonia Region. So if we use Brussels Region, we should use the Flanders and Wallonia Regions too! 
* the Mayor of Brussels rules only the municipality. The Mayor of London rules all Greater London. More, the case of Greater London is an unique case in Britain, so it can be used without POVS. As said, this is not the case of Brussels Region.
* nl.wiki and fr.wiki, significantly, both consider the municipality of Brussels as "Brussels".
Really, there is a case which is very similar to Brussels (an urban area much larger than the municipality but without a general mayor) and is not the case of London but the case of Athens. And Athens is shown in this list (correctly) as a municipality of 664,000 inhabitants, even if the real Athens (Athens Prefecture) is a city of 3,000,000 inhabitants.--79.6.141.205 (talk) 15:50, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: "Brussels-Capital Region" is official name, with a population of 1,138,854. Subtropical-man talk(en-2) 21:08, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Exactly... one of the three Regions of Belgium, which are similar to a US state or a Province of Canada. Definetely not a city.--79.6.141.205 (talk) 21:49, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I see your point and I totally agree with you. After all, the title of this page is "List of largest cities of the European Union by population within city limits" and so, by definition, Brussels should not be included in the list.--Kingston28 (talk) 13:56, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: These kind of discussions are rather meaningless as long as the so-called "list" is just a random collection of cities put together by Wikipedia users ignoring WP:OR. Any list need to be based on a source, and then follow what the source says. The lack of proper sourcing is exactly what discussions like this one arise.Jeppiz (talk) 21:40, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree it's a mistake to use the population figure for the entire Brussels Region. The city of Brussels had a population of 175,534 in 2015. I also agree with Jeppiz that this article is a complete mess. — 37  (talk) 10:58, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

text: What is perceived as a city is not an administrative area though. The Brussels-Capital Region spans a conurbation, with multiple urban centres (albeit, Brussels being the main one). Other towns in the Brussels-Capital Region have distinct identities, and are described as "suburbs". Similarly, parts of Paris' urban area in the Petite Couronne "Inner RIng" are always described as Paris' suburbs, and form part of the identity of Paris. We don't consider the Paris and the Petite Couronne the city limit of Paris. Like I said in my post below, I think we should list both. This is a list of city limits, and evidently some cities have more than one area that could be considered the city' limit. Rob984 (talk) 17:12, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  I do think that we have to consider "the" administrative area. After all it's that we do for countries. Had the Scottish voted for their independence, this would have immediately changed the population of the UK without anyone having moved; but that does not means that listing the population of the UK is nonsense. Usually the territorial limit of a country poses less problems though (although some special oversea territories might sometimes poses problems too but that's an other question). Now that's true that sometimes it is unclear which administrative limit have to be taken into consideration. For Brussels, both the city center and the "Brussels-Capital" region bears the name of Brussels and are candidate. My point is that the Brussels Capital Region that should be considered to be Brussels and the 19 "communes" being the equivalent of the Paris "arrondissements". Note that the local population of Brussels do not call any of 19 communes the suburb (périphérie). What is called the suburb is the territory outside the 19 communes (but within the broader much less well defined metropolitan aera or urban aera). This is an error we see sometimes in Foreign media. As an anecdote I remember the Begian TV (RTBF) complaining that the French media called "Molenbeek" (one of the Brussels commune) the Brussels suburb when it was not.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.246.197.50 (talk) 21:25, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Brussels 

message: London and Brussels both have two areas that could be considered "city limits". Each have one area with city-status: the City of London and the City of Brussels, and another administrative area: Greater London region and Brussels-Capital Region. By no means do I think every city with some kind of outer city-region should have two figures, but in these cases there is clear ambiguity in what is considered the "city limit", so why not just list both? The title specifies "city limits"–of which they both are. To be clear, I think they should remain in the same entry, with the position determined by the larger figure, eg "8,538,689 / 7,375"; and a note explaining the two areas. Rob984 (talk) 17:47, 3 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cities with more than one city limit? 

message: This list is very misleading, as the rules for city limits differ extremely much between different countries. Some examples - Paris is together with London and Moscow, the largest cities in Europe. For Copenhagen is only its tiny municipality value shown, another city, Frederiksberg is located totally inside Copenhagen. And 150 year old parts of Copenhagen (like Hellerup) are located in what may look like suburban areas, but which isn't. This comes down to local politics, Denmark doesn't want more than a third of its population to live in one city, on the paper. Amsterdam is more or less built together with Hague and several other cities, Dortmund is just a smaller part of the Ruhr-conglomerate. While Berlin includes huge areas of woods and other green areas but is built together with Potsdam. In some cases are there no city limits at all. I've already mentioned Copenhagen, but neither Stockholm has any city limits. I would like to change this list to urban areas instead. At least for cities which lacks city limits. This ought to be the case for Paris regardless of any possible city limits. Point is, as of now , this list cannot be used for any purpose. Boeing720 (talk) 22:24, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which "city limits" ? 

message: What’s the difference between Athens and Brussels? Both the cities cover the urban center only, but Athens is counted in its City limits, while Brussels in its regional metro limits. Such a discrimination is not objective.--Utente provinciale (talk) 15:36, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discrimination Athens-Brussels 

message: It strikes me that since the entire second paragraph seems to be a disclaimer for the figures that it more than worth it to add the land area to each entry in the table. I find these articles of city limits useful, as it's the only consistent way to compare cities (though other measurements are certainly worthwhile). But if we're going to to get into any detail about how some city/local government boundaries span vast territories and others don't, perhaps we should show that, too.--Criticalthinker (talk) 10:22, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Land Area 

message: Brussels should definitely be on this list and it is not. According to official numbers, it has a population of over 1M people. And it is know as Belgium’s most populous city. Antwerp, which is 2nd, did make the list. 24.4.177.254 (talk) 07:32, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Brussels is missing 

message: You are missing Brussels 94.109.158.234 (talk) 10:34, 10 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  You are missing Brussels 

message: Hi, in the table it says Bucharest is number 4 in population with over 2.1 million. If you check out the Bucharest Wikipedia page, it only displays a population of 1.8 million. 
Which one is wrong? 213.225.35.89 (talk) 08:42, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The source is cited, you can compare it yourself. FromCzech (talk) 09:33, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bucharest 

message: Where is Utrecht ? 5.173.159.10 (talk) 18:34, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Utrecht 

message: The photos are nice, but they could appear along the table, instead of inside it. They make the table four times as long as it needs to be, and only 8 entries can be viewed at once (on my screen), instead of ~30.
Any excess photos could be placed in a gallery at the bottom of the page. Or, really, they could be removed. This isn't a list of photos. Wizmut (talk) 09:53, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Imho they can be removed. They are more illustrative than adding value to the table. No other option than to keep the current state or remove them makes sense to me. A photo of Berlin as the largest city next to the lead can be preserved. FromCzech (talk) 13:15, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photos in table