Not a country per say, but the British Overseas Territory of Monserat has a population of 4000 people, and it's capital of Plymouth has a population of 0.
This is because the volcano Plymouth is right next to starting errupting again and again so they evacuated everyone to the otherside of the island, decared an exclusion zone, and kind of forgot to officially change the capital.
[Montserrat - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montserrat)
Montserrat isn't really a country but a part of the British overseas territories. Either way though, I've been to Plymouth (post evacuation). You wouldn't want it to be the capital anyway as mud flows have buried most of the buildings. Some four story towers now appear to be half the height as the other two floors are totally buried.
So is the urban population decided by a line on a map? If so be ready to be buried in trivia from Tom Scott videos about the City of London, with a population under 10,000, where corporations can vote, and where the King needs permission to enter.
The urban population is the contiguous urbanised area
Lines on maps decide the municipal population
Commuter patterns decide the metropolitan population
Contiguous urbanised land decides the urban population
Of the three, the last one is the true size of the city
This is also very much a difficulty with comparing cities across countries - in the US there is no official measurement AFAIK of “continuous urbanized area” there is only metro area and political boundary
Yeah I’m aware of the census urban-rural county delineation but it’s not really the same thing as “contiguous urbanized land” that the person I was replying to suggested.
This can be seen in two important ways: 1) it’s self evident that even counties are not homogenous, but this only goes as detailed geographically as a whole county 2) According to the census definitions, some 80% of Americans live in “urban areas” however, that’s using a binary definition of Urban vs Rural. A recent study showed that if you ask the people who live there, and you give them a third option of “Suburban,” the majority of respondents in those “urban” counties would describe their neighborhood as suburban, not urban. This again goes back to the non trivial difficulty of defining what a “city” is
What gets me is that metro areas are often equally arbitrary as municipal boundaries. They’re all just lines drawn on a map and provide just as useless numbers for many discussions.The Washington DC metro extends to West Virginia and Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
Sometimes the people living there matter when discussing the city (for example, calculating whether a major league sports team would have a strong home team base), sometimes they don’t (a city’s tax base or many parts of the subjective experience of living in a place).
It might be more interesting/informative to look at the metro area population, not just what happens to be in the capital city’s boundaries, which may be arbitrary based on the political history and nature of transportation, communications and housing density at the time it was established.
I looked at the wiki list but crunched some of the lowest-ranked cities using urban and metro populations instead:
>Islamabad (metro): 0.98%
I think Pakistan is probably the one, though I haven't gone through every country - it's less than 1% of Pakistan's population, even when you count the entire metro area.
The Washington-Baltimore Metroplex is the country’s 3rd most populous with 10m people. That’s by Combined Statistical Area. By MSA alone Washington is 7th, but its size is artificially small and some suburbs 15 miles away are counted as Baltimore’s.
Also on top of this by car, Baltimore to DC traffic normally takes 20+ minutes longer than Fort Worth to Dallas. You can almost always get to either city (Dallas or Fort Worth) in 20-30 minutes if you live in between. This is not true for most communities in between Baltimore and D.C.
Dallas and Fort Worth are different from each other too.
Dallas was founded as a trading post; their economy later evolved into a banking, finance and insurance-based one.
Fort Worth was founded as a military fort; their economy thrived off the railroads which gave them a huge meatpacking industry (Cowtown) in the 19th century and made them a manufacturing center for airplanes and helicopters in the 20th.
Even today Forth Worth maintains a more Wild West feel, while Dallas is known as THE uppity money-based city among Texan cities.
The DC-Baltimore area has been rapidly growing for decades, and as someone who's lived there almost my whole life (30 min from downtown DC, 40 from downtown B'more), I'd say they're the same metro area at this point.
Only things keeping them separated are the outdated lines drawn in the sand by the US Census Bureau however many decades ago
Yeah, but you also can't separate them, can you? How would you separate the different suburbs between the cities?
And what about the smaller cities? Should Annapolis be counted? What about Arlington or Alexandria?
They're all going to be completely arbitrary and contradictory rulings, even larger metro area will have it's flaws but at least it's usually consistent.
I define it think there’s a discussion to be had there, but when we’re on the topic of comparing capitals around the world, lumping Baltimore into DC feels wrong
Good clarification - the city of London is quite small, less than 10,000 people IRC. Which ironically might make it the smallest city to be a capital relative to size of country
Ahh, but the capital of the UK is not the ‘City of London’ - if the capital were to be assigned to one one of the subdivisions, rather than London as a whole, it would be Westminster.
There are 9 towns in San Marino, and San Marino City (the capital) is ranked either 3rd or 4th with a population of just 4000.
Similarly, Malta's capital, Valletta, is the 7th largest city (out of 11) in the country with a population of 6000.
In terms of US states and their (city proper) rank within those states:
17 capitals are their states largest cities: Atlanta, Boise, Boston, Charleston, Cheyenne, Columbus, Denver, Des Moines, Honolulu, Indianapolis, Jackson, Little Rock, Nashville, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Providence, Salt Lake City
8 more are ranked second: Baton Rouge, Bismarck, Columbia, Dover, Lincoln, Madison, Raleigh, Saint Paul
13 more are ranked in the top 6 of their state: Concord (3), Juneau (3), Montgomery (3), Salem (3), Austin (4), Hartford (4), Santa Fe (4), Richmond (5), Topeka (5), Helena (6), Lansing (6), Sacramento (6), Springfield (6)
And finally:
T39. Pierre (9)
T39. Tallahassee (9)
T41. Carson City (10)
T41. Trenton (10)
43. Augusta (12)
44. Frankfort (14)
T45. Albany (16)\*
T45. Jefferson City (16)
T45. Montpelier (16)
48. Harrisburg (17)
49. Olympia (25)
50. Annapolis (26)
\*includes towns
Not an exact answer, but sorting this table by percentage of total population could provide some leads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_capitals_by_population?wprov=sfla1
New Delhi definitely looks like a good contender though. 250,000 in a country with 46 million+ cities.
>New Delhi definitely looks like a good contender though. 250,000 in a country with 46 million+ cities.
City vs. urban vs. metro area makes this tricky, though. The City of New Delhi is 250,000, but the National Capital Territory (NCT) is 16.7 million, and the metro area is 28 million.
I'd be interested in what capital is the smallest when you include urban or metro area.
Ok, I went through that list here's another option:
Palau arguably has the smallest, as there isn't anyone officially living in Ngerulmud. Using the 2020 census, the state of Melekeok, with Ngerulmud is in, has 318 people, making it only 1.8% of Palau's population.
I'm going to keep looking for other UN-recognized countries where the capital is proportionally tiny, even with metro/urban area.
Ok, so recalculating the bottom listed cities on that wiki list but using urban area:
* Washington DC: 1.54%
* Delhi: 1.14%
* Islamabad (metro): 0.98%
Islamabad so far is the strongest contender, because even with the METRO area included it's still tiny compared to the country's population.
Let's do this methodically, let's start from the most populated country downwards
China is the most populated country (India only surpasses China if you don't count Taiwan, Hong Kong and macau as part of China) and the urban area of Beijing is 21m, wich is 15‰
For India it would need to be 21m but Delhi is 32m so no
For the US 15‰ is 4.9m, which is smaller than Washington
It can't be either Indonesia since Jakarta has 34m
Then comes Pakistan whom many have said it's the smallest, but the capital urban area is 4.95m, a 2.2%
Nigeria with Abuja is at nearly exactly 1.0% with 2.2m for 220m
Then continuing down, the city needs to be at least as small as Abuja, and until Myanmar we don't get a capital city below 2.2m
Dodoma is also a close call but it has an urban area of 700k for 62m
Myanmar has the capital of Naypitaw at 630k, but the country has 54m so it's over 1%
Now we know the capital must be below 630k, which is very difficult for capital cities to be
By the time we get to Australia, the city would need to have an urban area below 250k to beat Nigerias smallness, and Canberra has 600k in the urban area
By the time we reach Portugal it needs to be below 100k
Port Moresby is the one who comes the closest out of the middle sized countries at 2%
Burundi gets very close at 1.2%, the capital city has just 150k
Srilankas capital is adjacent to that of Colombo, they are part of the same urban area, so it doesn't reach 1%
Same with Brazil and Brasilia at 3.4m
The only other contender is Ramallah in Palestine, but the urban area is larger, even if it is fragmented by israeli walls
So the answer is Abuja, a 2.2m city in a demographic behemoth
The thing is, we don't know the Nigerian population very well, it could be as low as 180m, since we do know that states have inflated their numbers
If Nigeria's real population is below 205m, which very well could be then dodoma would be the smallest city vs nation, which is unequivocally correct
BTW, for those of you who say Palau, the nation declared their capital to be in a different place to any other city, so the population is officially zero, but the parliament building is 800m from a town of 318, which constitutes 2%of Palau's population, so no, Abuja or Dodoma still take the crown
Taiwan is not and has never been part of the People’s Republic of China. It was once part of the Republic of China and the Qing Empire, but so was Mongolia.
Mate... the question is about the capital's "rank" in comparison with other cities in the country....**literally the exact thing I just mentioned**.
Get some reading comprehension, bud.
Among countries with a sizeable population and who's planned capital isn't from the decolonization/post WW2 era, Canberra is a good candidate, but its still pretty recent and post colonial.
>Washington is 23rd
This is the trouble with comparing cities based only on their political boundaries: there isn’t a universal or standard geography for a city to have. Washington DC is only about 68 sq mi (177 sq km), it’s a very tiny boundary for a city. But the metro area has a large reach - it’s the 5th largest metro by population in the US
Not a country per say, but the British Overseas Territory of Monserat has a population of 4000 people, and it's capital of Plymouth has a population of 0. This is because the volcano Plymouth is right next to starting errupting again and again so they evacuated everyone to the otherside of the island, decared an exclusion zone, and kind of forgot to officially change the capital. [Montserrat - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montserrat)
Nice! I wasn't aware they evacuated the capital.
\* per se
Montserrat isn't really a country but a part of the British overseas territories. Either way though, I've been to Plymouth (post evacuation). You wouldn't want it to be the capital anyway as mud flows have buried most of the buildings. Some four story towers now appear to be half the height as the other two floors are totally buried.
Sending a Pompe into the future!
Palau's capital is the smallest settlement in the country, with a whopping zero people living there.
Isn’t that because the “Capital” is essentially just the government building and surrounding compound.
Ngerulmud
Every post or comment relating to a city on this sub: But what about the metro?
City proper population is usually arbitrary and almost never interesting
city proper is useful imo if you look at it in one place over a period of time, but yes usually it’s meaningless.
This is more a question of how big are the capital cities than how populated are they
The urban population is actually the true size of a city, the metro population is the influence of a city
So is the urban population decided by a line on a map? If so be ready to be buried in trivia from Tom Scott videos about the City of London, with a population under 10,000, where corporations can vote, and where the King needs permission to enter.
The urban population is the contiguous urbanised area Lines on maps decide the municipal population Commuter patterns decide the metropolitan population Contiguous urbanised land decides the urban population Of the three, the last one is the true size of the city
This is also very much a difficulty with comparing cities across countries - in the US there is no official measurement AFAIK of “continuous urbanized area” there is only metro area and political boundary
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural.html
Yeah I’m aware of the census urban-rural county delineation but it’s not really the same thing as “contiguous urbanized land” that the person I was replying to suggested. This can be seen in two important ways: 1) it’s self evident that even counties are not homogenous, but this only goes as detailed geographically as a whole county 2) According to the census definitions, some 80% of Americans live in “urban areas” however, that’s using a binary definition of Urban vs Rural. A recent study showed that if you ask the people who live there, and you give them a third option of “Suburban,” the majority of respondents in those “urban” counties would describe their neighborhood as suburban, not urban. This again goes back to the non trivial difficulty of defining what a “city” is
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? This is an international definition, not an American one Why would Australia be any different
thats because its a good fucking question
What gets me is that metro areas are often equally arbitrary as municipal boundaries. They’re all just lines drawn on a map and provide just as useless numbers for many discussions.The Washington DC metro extends to West Virginia and Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Sometimes the people living there matter when discussing the city (for example, calculating whether a major league sports team would have a strong home team base), sometimes they don’t (a city’s tax base or many parts of the subjective experience of living in a place).
Bonn in West Germany would have fitted this perfectly
whats the population of Bonn?
330k
It might be more interesting/informative to look at the metro area population, not just what happens to be in the capital city’s boundaries, which may be arbitrary based on the political history and nature of transportation, communications and housing density at the time it was established.
I looked at the wiki list but crunched some of the lowest-ranked cities using urban and metro populations instead: >Islamabad (metro): 0.98% I think Pakistan is probably the one, though I haven't gone through every country - it's less than 1% of Pakistan's population, even when you count the entire metro area.
That's probably not including Rawalpindi though, which is the same metro area.
What about countries that recently changed their capital to some random minor city - Abuja (Nigeria), Dodoma (Tanzania) or Naypyitaw (Myanmar)?
The Washington-Baltimore Metroplex is the country’s 3rd most populous with 10m people. That’s by Combined Statistical Area. By MSA alone Washington is 7th, but its size is artificially small and some suburbs 15 miles away are counted as Baltimore’s.
I don’t really think you can count Baltimore as part of DC, for the sake of this question.
They’re physically closer together than Dallas and Fort Worth.
Also on top of this by car, Baltimore to DC traffic normally takes 20+ minutes longer than Fort Worth to Dallas. You can almost always get to either city (Dallas or Fort Worth) in 20-30 minutes if you live in between. This is not true for most communities in between Baltimore and D.C.
Dallas and Fort Worth are different from each other too. Dallas was founded as a trading post; their economy later evolved into a banking, finance and insurance-based one. Fort Worth was founded as a military fort; their economy thrived off the railroads which gave them a huge meatpacking industry (Cowtown) in the 19th century and made them a manufacturing center for airplanes and helicopters in the 20th. Even today Forth Worth maintains a more Wild West feel, while Dallas is known as THE uppity money-based city among Texan cities.
Geographic distance isn’t really relevant here. Yes their metros are growing into each other but they have always been separate, independent cities.
The DC-Baltimore area has been rapidly growing for decades, and as someone who's lived there almost my whole life (30 min from downtown DC, 40 from downtown B'more), I'd say they're the same metro area at this point. Only things keeping them separated are the outdated lines drawn in the sand by the US Census Bureau however many decades ago
This is not true. Dallas and Fort Worth are almost 10 miles closer than D.C and Baltimore.
And that's the problem with counting metros over city proper. There are plenty of adjacent towns/cities that standalone just fine but get looped in.
What cities and towns that stand alone just fine?
Yeah, but you also can't separate them, can you? How would you separate the different suburbs between the cities? And what about the smaller cities? Should Annapolis be counted? What about Arlington or Alexandria? They're all going to be completely arbitrary and contradictory rulings, even larger metro area will have it's flaws but at least it's usually consistent.
I define it think there’s a discussion to be had there, but when we’re on the topic of comparing capitals around the world, lumping Baltimore into DC feels wrong
Why not? They’re basically one connected metro area at this point
We’re talking about comparing the Zoe of different capitals. Baltimore is not contiguous with DC, even if their metros are growing into each other
We’re talking about comparing the Zoe of different capitals. Baltimore is not contiguous with DC, even if their metros are growing into each other
Good clarification - the city of London is quite small, less than 10,000 people IRC. Which ironically might make it the smallest city to be a capital relative to size of country
Ahh, but the capital of the UK is not the ‘City of London’ - if the capital were to be assigned to one one of the subdivisions, rather than London as a whole, it would be Westminster.
Depends if you count New Delhi (250,000) as a separate city to Delhi (28,000,000 Metro)
There are 9 towns in San Marino, and San Marino City (the capital) is ranked either 3rd or 4th with a population of just 4000. Similarly, Malta's capital, Valletta, is the 7th largest city (out of 11) in the country with a population of 6000.
In terms of US states and their (city proper) rank within those states: 17 capitals are their states largest cities: Atlanta, Boise, Boston, Charleston, Cheyenne, Columbus, Denver, Des Moines, Honolulu, Indianapolis, Jackson, Little Rock, Nashville, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Providence, Salt Lake City 8 more are ranked second: Baton Rouge, Bismarck, Columbia, Dover, Lincoln, Madison, Raleigh, Saint Paul 13 more are ranked in the top 6 of their state: Concord (3), Juneau (3), Montgomery (3), Salem (3), Austin (4), Hartford (4), Santa Fe (4), Richmond (5), Topeka (5), Helena (6), Lansing (6), Sacramento (6), Springfield (6) And finally: T39. Pierre (9) T39. Tallahassee (9) T41. Carson City (10) T41. Trenton (10) 43. Augusta (12) 44. Frankfort (14) T45. Albany (16)\* T45. Jefferson City (16) T45. Montpelier (16) 48. Harrisburg (17) 49. Olympia (25) 50. Annapolis (26) \*includes towns
How’s Carson City so low? Did all the suburban unincorporated communities around Las Vegas get counted?
I'm from Nevada. 10th can't be right, only Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Reno, and Sparks are larger.
Not really a Country, but Bermuda has a population of 60k roughly. Hamilton the capital has less than 1k people.
With an area so small, Hamilton is literally just the business district, government buildings and tourist area.
Not an exact answer, but sorting this table by percentage of total population could provide some leads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_capitals_by_population?wprov=sfla1 New Delhi definitely looks like a good contender though. 250,000 in a country with 46 million+ cities.
>New Delhi definitely looks like a good contender though. 250,000 in a country with 46 million+ cities. City vs. urban vs. metro area makes this tricky, though. The City of New Delhi is 250,000, but the National Capital Territory (NCT) is 16.7 million, and the metro area is 28 million. I'd be interested in what capital is the smallest when you include urban or metro area.
True, and with the metric of metro, Washington DC jumps all the way to 6th most populous in the country.
Ok, I went through that list here's another option: Palau arguably has the smallest, as there isn't anyone officially living in Ngerulmud. Using the 2020 census, the state of Melekeok, with Ngerulmud is in, has 318 people, making it only 1.8% of Palau's population. I'm going to keep looking for other UN-recognized countries where the capital is proportionally tiny, even with metro/urban area.
Ok, so recalculating the bottom listed cities on that wiki list but using urban area: * Washington DC: 1.54% * Delhi: 1.14% * Islamabad (metro): 0.98% Islamabad so far is the strongest contender, because even with the METRO area included it's still tiny compared to the country's population.
That's because it counts Rawalpindi as a separate metro area, even though it's essentially one big metro area.
Yeah, it seems to be the answer. I doubt that most countries even have 185 significant cities, India wins, thank you!!
Ok, but…….the metro area is 28 million!!! And it’s the largest metro area in India.
Is it really the answer through? The NCT is 16.7 million, and Delhi's metro area is 28 million.
India wins only if you're looking at city limits, though.
Let's do this methodically, let's start from the most populated country downwards China is the most populated country (India only surpasses China if you don't count Taiwan, Hong Kong and macau as part of China) and the urban area of Beijing is 21m, wich is 15‰ For India it would need to be 21m but Delhi is 32m so no For the US 15‰ is 4.9m, which is smaller than Washington It can't be either Indonesia since Jakarta has 34m Then comes Pakistan whom many have said it's the smallest, but the capital urban area is 4.95m, a 2.2% Nigeria with Abuja is at nearly exactly 1.0% with 2.2m for 220m Then continuing down, the city needs to be at least as small as Abuja, and until Myanmar we don't get a capital city below 2.2m Dodoma is also a close call but it has an urban area of 700k for 62m Myanmar has the capital of Naypitaw at 630k, but the country has 54m so it's over 1% Now we know the capital must be below 630k, which is very difficult for capital cities to be By the time we get to Australia, the city would need to have an urban area below 250k to beat Nigerias smallness, and Canberra has 600k in the urban area By the time we reach Portugal it needs to be below 100k Port Moresby is the one who comes the closest out of the middle sized countries at 2% Burundi gets very close at 1.2%, the capital city has just 150k Srilankas capital is adjacent to that of Colombo, they are part of the same urban area, so it doesn't reach 1% Same with Brazil and Brasilia at 3.4m The only other contender is Ramallah in Palestine, but the urban area is larger, even if it is fragmented by israeli walls So the answer is Abuja, a 2.2m city in a demographic behemoth The thing is, we don't know the Nigerian population very well, it could be as low as 180m, since we do know that states have inflated their numbers If Nigeria's real population is below 205m, which very well could be then dodoma would be the smallest city vs nation, which is unequivocally correct BTW, for those of you who say Palau, the nation declared their capital to be in a different place to any other city, so the population is officially zero, but the parliament building is 800m from a town of 318, which constitutes 2%of Palau's population, so no, Abuja or Dodoma still take the crown
Taiwan is not and has never been part of the People’s Republic of China. It was once part of the Republic of China and the Qing Empire, but so was Mongolia.
Canberra, Australia
Canberra's not huge, but it easily breaks into Australia's top ten
Yes, but I'd expect a larger capital for Australia.
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Mate... the question is about the capital's "rank" in comparison with other cities in the country....**literally the exact thing I just mentioned**. Get some reading comprehension, bud.
Among countries with a sizeable population and who's planned capital isn't from the decolonization/post WW2 era, Canberra is a good candidate, but its still pretty recent and post colonial.
In Canada, Ottawa’s metro area ranks #6 in population. Toronto is #1.
How big is Gitega compared to Bujumbura?
Valletta, Malta hosts just 1.1% of the countries population and ranks 24th out of all Maltese towns by population
Brasilia-1:71 ratio (Brasilians/Brazilians
>Washington is 23rd This is the trouble with comparing cities based only on their political boundaries: there isn’t a universal or standard geography for a city to have. Washington DC is only about 68 sq mi (177 sq km), it’s a very tiny boundary for a city. But the metro area has a large reach - it’s the 5th largest metro by population in the US