Think of some big cities. Really really big. Guess what? Whatever names first popped into your head, those aren’t obscure.
Now think of some obscure cities. Cities you haven’t thought about in more than a year. Cities that aren’t in the news. Got them? I’ll bet there are larger cities than this initial list.
So my challenge to you is to think of the biggest obscure cities. The more populous and more obscure, the better. List up to five of these cities. Lock in your answer now.
My answer is spoiler tagged to prevent poisoning the results of others. (Please do likewise)St. Petersburg (45)
Timbuktu (n/a)
Dresden (n/a)
Jakarta (6)
Manila (11)The rankings came from this page, which is closer to the Wikipedia results and more current than this other page. (Pages found by googling “largest cities in the world”)
After you’ve locked in your answer, please visit the first linked page and indicate the first city you’ve never heard of on the list (again, in spoiler tags, please).My answer is Dhaka, Bangladesh (21), which I suspect will be the largest obscure city, unless someone else picks it in their top 5 list. In which case we shall really find out which is the largest obscure city.
Just a reminder, please spoiler tag all answers. Spoiler both the initial guess and the second answer, please. City names posted openly can skew the result.
Suzhou, China. It’s the birth home of architect I.M. Pei, and I was completely unaware of it until I saw a program on PBS. It has something like 6 million people.
Louisville, KY
Charleston, SC
Kansas City, MO
Cleveland, OH
Tampa, FL
Well, I limited myself to the United States (didn’t read the whole post first!), or my answers would have been vastly different. And by “obscure” I meant unacclaimed, not famous, i.e., not what most people would rattle off as the largest cities in the United States, and I didn’t mean “unheard of.”
Your first link only lists capital cities, which aren’t all necessarily the biggest cities in any particular place. So my pre-conception is that I’ll have heard of all of them. But let me see…
Okay. I’m mislead by the header, since I’m fairly certain that #4 isn’t the capital of its country or its state.
Results:
#16, Lagos, Nigeria, but sub-Saharan Africa’s unimportance has always influenced my not caring about it. #99, Maputo, Mozambique, for similar reasons. South Africa’s always been uncharacteristically important, so I didn’t miss that, and I’m pretty sure that the only reason I knew #84 (Abidjan) was because of the recent World Cup.
#??, Lots of Chinese cities. Oddly, I did know a few here and there, with weight towards the smaller ones.
It’s hard for me to think about places I haven’t thought of lately. It just seems like an inherently difficult thing to think about. Plus, I think about what are probably obscure places to most people all the time, as I’m nearly done with my masters degree in public policy, with a focus on international development. Want to hear about drug trafficking in Guinea-Bissau? I did a big research paper on it a few months ago. That kind of thing.
The largest city I didn’t recognize was Essen, Germany, pop. 6.6 million. Surely at some point I must have heard of it, but if someone told me they were going to Essen to visit a friend, I’d be like “where the hell is Essen?”.
Essen is a bit of a spoiler because it’s part of the Rhein-Ruhr conurbation, which is often treated as a single metropolitan area (among other things, it has very coherent public transit). Wikipedia says this:
A more expansive metro area, the Rhine-Ruhr, includes Cologne, Duesseldorf, Wuppertal, and Bonn.
I didn’t do the first bit because obscure is a weirdly relative term.
The first city on the list I hadn’t heard of was:
Shenyang (38). I knew it would be a Chinese city because I looked at a “biggest cities” list before and I was surprised by how many huge Chinese cities I’d never heard of."
Shenyang is where the BMW China factory is located.
The Chinese list has far too few cities. Most of the Chinese cities on the link are using the “city limits” definition rather than the “municipal area.” Akin to listing the population of Los Angeles versus the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
China has about 160 cities with a population over 1 million - so there are plenty I haven’t heard of. But I’ve probably visited or driving through 100+ of these.
Defining “obscure” as “I’d have to think for a while to figure out the country if I just heard the city” I get
Sao Paolo
Lagos
Dhaka
Tianjin
Chennai
Obviously this is very dependent on your location - I imagine the first on my list would surprise many people, but it’s a fair way away. likewise the last two on your original list are pretty much right nextdoor to me.
