In my book, 1M people is when a city starts to become a “proper” city. It’ll host major events, invest in public transit (beyond bus), have extensive infrastructure, have extremely thorough airport service, likely have many walkable neighborhoods, and generally feel like a city.
Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
>Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
That's a very US or modern Asian city view. In my corner of the world, the Rhine-Ruhr area and the Franco/German/Benelux region almost all cities are < 1 million but you'd be hard pressed to not call Ghent or Rotterdam[1] or Düsseldorf a proper city.
probably the median income of the area also goes into it, 1m with low median income might perform at about the same as 800,000 with high median income.
European cities - compared to U.S at least - also maybe have the factor of how long it has been a city to contribute to how much "a city" it seems.
Edinburgh, where I have lived/worked for 40 years and has a population of just over 500K has all of those and more: major arts festivals, good train and growing tram networks, good airport links, very walkable and certainly "feels" more like a city than a lot of much larger cities.
“This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”
the "City of Edinburgh" may be 500k people, but the metropolitan area is bigger - once you include the outlying towns which people commute from there's more like 800-900k people.
We're talking metro area, not city. If the city is 1M, it's metro area is likely 1.5 to 3 million. If the metro area is 1m then the city is probably 750k to 350k people.
The post above said "The Concepción metro area is 1 million people" which means the city itself is much smaller. In fact, Wikipedia says it's 200k people, 1m metro area
Just a quibble about the metro to city population ratio... I think it's usually a lot higher than 1.5 or 3 to 1. Portland where I live has a population of around 650k (city) and 2.6M (metro). So about 4:1. And it's one of the less spread out metro areas in the US. The LA metro has about 18.5M and the city itself about 4M. Chicago is also about 4:1. NYC is the exception at closer to 2.5:1.
Just having grown up in LA (the city), I think there's a cognitive bias in these places against recognizing just how freakin large they are when you live there. There are large corners of my home metro area I've never been to at all, whose people I would almost never interact with... and I say that as a former taxi driver! Of course, taxi driving in LA was always balkanized so you'd need separate licenses to pick up in this or that suburb... very Snow Crash-like even in the 90s.
...in America. In Eastern Europe, even 100k-200k city will have trams or trolleybuses, and will have most people living in condos near public transit, not in suburbs.
Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.