Moscow, the capital ofRussia, has the most populousmetropolitan area in Europe.Europe and some parts of Africa and Asia by night. Lights reveal the urbanized areas of Europe. It also shows theBlue Banana megalopolis from north-west England to northern Italy, and theGolden Banana urbanized area between Genoa and Valencia.Blue,Golden, Green Bananas
This list ranksmetropolitan areas inEurope by their population according to three different sources; it includes metropolitan areas that have a population of over 1 million.
List includes metropolitan areas according only to the studies ofESPON,Eurostat, andOECD. For this reason some metropolitan areas, like the ItalianGenoa Metropolitan Area (with a population of 1,510,781 as of 2010[1]) or the UkrainianKryvyi Rih metropolitan area (with a population of 1,170,953 as of 2019[2]), are not included in this list, with data by other statistic survey institutes.
Population figures correspond to the populations ofFunctional urban areas (FUA). The concept of a functional urban area defines a metropolitan area as a core urban area defined morphologically on the basis of population density, plus the surrounding labour pool defined on the basis of commuting.Figures in the first two population columns use a harmonised definition of a Functional urban area developed jointly in 2011, with delimitation basing on the DEGURBA method.[3][4]
Further information on how the areas are defined can be found in the source documents. These figures should be seen as an interpretation, not as conclusive fact.
^Lewis Dijkstra, Hugo Poelman (2012-03-01).Cities in Europe - The new OECD-EC definition(PDF) (Report). p. 2. Retrieved2024-06-08.Until recently, there was no harmonised definition of 'a city' for European and other countries member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This undermined the comparability, and thus also the credibility, of cross-country analysis of cities. To resolve this problem, the OECD and the European Commission developed a new definition of a city and its commuting zone in 2011. […] Each city is part of its own commuting zone or a polycentric commuting zone covering multiple cities. These commuting zones are significant, especially for larger cities. The cities and commuting zones together (called Larger Urban Zones) account for 60 % of the EU population.
Germany
Netherlands
Poland/
Czech Republic
Belgium
Austria/
Slovakia
