I’ve wondered off and on for some time about how-well correlated most people’s perceptions of what cities are “major” compared to the population size. The ten-biggest cities (all of which now have over a million people each) would be pretty well correlated. Some – perhaps many – of the ones further down the list, not so well. For example, probably almost everybody would place Miami on their list of major cities before Colorado Springs–and yet Colorado Springs has more population, and has for some time. (CS is currently the 39th biggest city in the nation, and Miami is 40th.)
For myself, I would certainly list Atlanta (#37), Kansas City MO (#38), Omaha (#42), and even Pittsburgh (#66) before Mesa AZ (#35).
Some of those numbers are probably a bit skewed as the population will only reflect the city proper and not the surrounding metropolitan area. For example Milwaukee is shown as 592,000 but the entire metropolitan area is in excess of 1.5 million.
Mesa tends to get lumped together with Phoenix, since it’s basically a suburb and maybe twenty miles away; Colorado Springs is farther from Denver, but I at least tend to lump those two together as well. I expect most people think of Arlington, Texas (#48) only as a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth, rather than a freestanding city in its own right.
The incorporated area of Colorado Springs is 5 times the size of Miami. Population density plays as much (if not more ) of a role on perception as total population.
Before I look at the list, I’ll mention the classic example is San Jose (bigger) vs. San Francisco (more famous, and perceived by most as bigger, surely).
Yeah, the population of the entire metropolitan area is really a better measure for most things than just the population of the incorporated city. I was surprised to see that Charlotte (16) ranked so much higher than Atlanta (37). But when you look at the entire metropolitan statistical area the positions are reversed, with Atlanta–Athens-Clarke County–Sandy Springs at 11 and Charlotte-Concord at 23. That’s probably has a lot to do with people’s perceptions of Atlanta’s size. The metro area is quite large, but most of that population doesn’t live in the city of Atlanta proper, but in the suburbs just outside the city.
Many people are surprised at how small San Francisco’s population is, as well. I mean, ranking #15 is nothing to sneeze at, but most people assume it’s much bigger. In fact, San Jose has a larger population than San Francisco. But taken all together, the entire San Francisco Bay Area (Which includes San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and other smaller suburbs) is the 5th largest metro area in the US.
San Jose didn’t pass San Francisco in population until the 1980’s. San Francisco was #15 in 1860 and has been one of the 15 largest U.S. cities for the 160 years ever since. Only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia (and Brooklyn if you will) can also make that claim. S.F. “played in the big leagues”: it was once headquarters of the world’s largest commercial bank; King Tut visited S.F. on his famous world tour; and so on.
When I was a teenager in the San Jose area and someone said “Let’s go to the City” they meant San Francisco.
A agree with bear nenno, I think population density is a big part of perception.
But also I wonder what role culture or sports plays. If a city has professional sports teams for example I think it is labeled a major city more than a city without them of the same size.
I don’t think population density is the biggest factor. Here, according to Wikipedia, are the ten incorporated cities with the largest population density.
Gutenberg, NJ
Union City, NJ
West New York, NJ
Hoboken, NJ
Kaser, NY
New York, NY
Cliffside Park, NJ
East Newark, NJ
Maywood, CA
Passaic, NJ
And there are things like whether the city has an airport with its name on it, and how big that airport is. Since ATL is the busiest airport in the USA it probably gives people the impression that Atlanta is a very big city.
But sports teams bearing the name of a city are often not in that city. To continue with the Bay Area example, the San Francisco 49ers are now in Santa Clara. Who feels reasonably ripped off by the lack of attention.
There might also be a landmark factor. There was a House Hunters episode set in our town. They showed the Golden Gate bridge as an establishing shot, which is easily 30 miles away and has nada to do with us.
Green Bay (my home town) is probably an extreme example of this. While most sports fans know that Green Bay is the smallest city to be home to an NFL team, I often find that people are surprised to learn just how small the city is – Green Bay proper has only 104,000 people. If you include its suburbs, you only get to 206,000, and its “metropolitan statistical area” (which includes all of the county it’s in, along with two neighboring counties) is only 320,000.
In my younger days I compared New York State to Los Angeles County. Both had one city of over a million, a couple around a half-million, and a dozen over 100k. But I did not FEEL that equivalence; metro LA, like metro NYC, just seemed a vast human blob.
A slew of interior US cities were major before deregulation of the last 40 years pushed money toward the coasts. Are major cities now marked by homeless hoards?
Tut came twice and we were there both times, first with wedding-gift tickets (and SNL Steve Martin tees), then decades later because we [del]could afford to[/del] had to. As for BofA: I gained much muscle mass as a bicycle courier pumping uphill to the Monolith overlooking the Financial District.
It’s still “THE City” and don’t anyone dare forget that! Then there was the garbage train hauling municipal trash to distant landfills - a train universally known as The Shitty of San Francisco.
I see issues with both lists mentioned and how they calculate the numbers. An example is Salt Lake City. On the Cities it’s 114th, behind cities I haven’t heard of. On the combined statistical area it’s 26th, which is probably too high.
And where I live is in the Nashville combined statistical area, and I don’t see how this could be considered Nashville. They consider it a micropolitan area.
For me a misconception is influenced by the size of the cities when I learned about them. For example, the Research Triangle cities in North Carolina has gone from under 500,000 to over 2,000,000 in the last 50 years. I see it closer to 500,000.
It’s not the population living within the city limits that matters, nor the population density alone. Even the population within metropolitan areas as defined by the Census bureau don’t do a particularly good job of standardizing things in my opinion.
A few years back, Louisville dramatically increased its official city population through the simple expediency of annexing the rest of its county. Louisville did not suddenly become a vastly more important city in the grand scheme of things. The event inspired me to wonder what would happen to the population of Boston (currently about 700,000 people in 48 square miles) if that city serially annexed its most densely populated contiguous suburbs until it reached the same land area as Chicago (population 2.7 million in 221 square miles). It would still be smaller in population than Chicago but not by very much. I don’t remember the exact figure I calculated, but I know Boston would easily be in the top 10 instead of stuck at number 21.
On the opposite side, Buffalo, NY may be overrepresented because it doesn’t have an extensive suburb network relative to its population, even compared to the other major cities of Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany.
I grew up in Fredonia which is only 35 miles from southern Lackawanna (a town which is definitely in the orbit of Buffalo) and not only did we not consider ourselves in the orbit of Buffalo, we rarely even talked about Buffalo. Whereas you can drive 60 miles and still be in the Orlando suburbs, or 40 miles for Albany despite it technically being a smaller city than Buffalo.
If you have cities with vast city limits, like Los Angeles, then the population density overall is not going to reflect what is the central part of a city. I mean, Maywood??? Really? Griffith Park itself (inside L.A.) is five times larger than the city of Maywood, which is really just part of the L.A. metro area.
At one time, (the 1990s), the census tracks just west of downtown L.A. had the highest population density in the country–higher than NYC. They were like a bunch of Maywoods all together. (That density has decreased since then, though, and I don’t know how they compare now.) The national media imagine of L.A. tends to be more of either the Westside or the suburbs, both much more spread out–that’s a filtered image.
Here is a 2012 piece (CityLab, analyzing 2010 census data)) on the densest US metro areas.
Densest (weighted) US metro areas then were: 1) New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA; 2) San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA; 3) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA; 4) Honolulu, HI; 5) Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI.
That’s basically a list of tiny suburbs. It’s the wrong list to use.
The one you want is in List of United States cities by population density Only cities over 100,000 are included, and even many of the densest of those are New York suburbs. At over 8,000 per square mile, Los Angeles is fantastically dense given its huge area.