Random European City Generator

How this random European city generator works

Press Generate and you get a city and its country. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Paris. London. Rome. Berlin. Madrid. Barcelona. Istanbul. Moscow. Athens. Prague. Vienna. Amsterdam.

Start with the first one, because Paris is smaller than it was a century ago, and the reason explains almost everything about how cities are counted.

Paris has fewer people than it had in 1921

The city of Paris reached its all-time population peak of about 2.9 million in 1921.

In 2023 it held 2,103,778.

Eight hundred thousand fewer people, over a century in which France's population grew substantially and the Paris region became the largest urban area in the European Union.

Nothing was destroyed. Nobody fled. What happened is that Paris ran out of room, and the people who would once have moved into Paris moved next to it instead, into communes that are not Paris and never became Paris.

This is not a Parisian peculiarity. It is what happened to nearly every core city in the developed world that did not expand its boundaries. The number went down because the line stayed still.

The walls last moved in 1860

On 1 January 1860, under a law promulgated by Napoleon III, Paris annexed the ring of communes around it. Auteuil, Passy, Vaugirard, Grenelle, Belleville, La Villette and others were swallowed whole.

That was the last major annexation.

The limits crept out to 86.9 square kilometres in the 1920s. In 1929 the two great forest parks, the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, were formally added, bringing the total to 105.4 square kilometres. And there it stopped.

Now hold that against Jacksonville, Florida, which in 1968 absorbed an entire county in a single day and became one of the largest cities in America by area.

Two cities. Two directions. One reason their populations cannot be compared.

Three Parises, all official

France's statistical office publishes several Parises, and each is a real measurement of a real thing.

• The commune. 2,103,778 people in 105.4 square kilometres. This is the city. It has a mayor.
• The unité urbaine, the continuously built-up area. 11,013,774 people in 2,824 square kilometres.
• The aire d'attraction, the functional zone from which people commute in. 13,320,752 people in 18,941 square kilometres.

Two million, eleven million, thirteen million. Nobody is wrong. They are counting three different objects, and the word "Paris" is attached to all three.

The commune runs at around twenty thousand people per square kilometre, which makes it one of the most densely populated communes in France. The ones ahead of it sit immediately outside its boundary, which is exactly the point.

So you cannot rank European cities

Every list of Europe's biggest cities you have ever seen is comparing objects of different kinds.

"Paris" usually means the commune, a 105 square kilometre oval drawn in 1860. "London" usually means Greater London, an administrative region created in 1965 that covers many times that area. One is a medieval city that stopped growing its boundary. The other is a boundary drawn around a modern conurbation.

There is no shared European definition of a city, which is why any honest cross-country ranking has to build one from scratch before it can start counting. Most rankings do not, and do not say so.

Which is why a name and a country is a more honest thing to hand you than a population.

Where Europe ends

The other reason European city lists disagree is that Europe has no eastern edge.

Istanbul straddles the Bosphorus, with a large share of its population on the Asian side. Everybody puts it on European lists, and it is half in Asia while they do it.

Yerevan, Tbilisi and Baku are harder. Draw the boundary of Europe along the crest of the Caucasus, which is what most physical geographers do, and all three sit on the Asian side of it.

Except that Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan all belong to the Council of Europe. Their football teams play in UEFA. Their broadcasters compete in Eurovision. By every institutional measure Europe uses to define itself, they are in it.

Physical geography says one thing. Political geography says another. Nobody with the authority to settle it has ever tried, and any list you read has quietly picked a side.

Moscow and St Petersburg, meanwhile, are unambiguous. Both sit well west of the Urals, on the European side of the only line anybody proposed.

Ways people actually use this

• Trip planning. The famous fifteen are only the famous fifteen. Bilbao, Gdansk and Ljubljana are all worth the flight.
• Quizzes. Show the city, ask for the country. Then ask which continent.
• Teaching statistics. Give a class the three Paris figures and ask which is correct.
• Writing. Every entry is a real city with a real history and about eleven centuries of it.
• Settling arguments. Ask somebody whether Paris is bigger than London, then ask them what they mean.

Getting more out of the filters

• Entries read "City, Country", so Contains works as a country filter. Try Italy, Spain, Poland.
• Type burg, grad or ville to slice Europe by the language that named the place. Each ending is a fortress, a town, or a settlement, in a different tongue.
• Type Saint, San and Sankt in turn. Same word, three churches.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character. Give them one letter, not a word.

Questions people ask

What is the population of Paris?

About 2.1 million in the commune, 11 million in the continuously built-up area, and 13.3 million in the functional metropolitan zone. All three are official figures published by France's statistical office.

Why has Paris lost population?

Because its boundary has not moved since 1860, so growth since then has happened in neighbouring communes rather than inside the city. The commune peaked at about 2.9 million in 1921.

Is Paris bigger than London?

The question has no answer without a definition. Greater London is an administrative region covering about fifteen times the area of the Paris commune. Compare urban areas or functional zones instead and the answer changes.

What is Europe's largest city?

It depends entirely on the boundary used, and on whether Istanbul and Moscow are counted. Any ranking that does not state its definition is telling you something about its author rather than about Europe.

Is Istanbul in Europe?

Partly. It sits on both sides of the Bosphorus, with a large share of its population on the Asian side. It appears on European lists because of the half that is.

References

1. Paris
2. Demographics of Paris
3. Geography of Paris