this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Meh, they seem to have gone beyond even the outer ring road. But I don't think it really needed that to be much larger than London.
I reckon Wuhan is more impressive, with the third ring road clearly visible from the maps and about 50km wide.
Shit there is even a further ring road that's almost 150km wide, but as others have said with OP's, the area is mostly fields so calling it Greater Wuhan would be really stretching it.
And Wuhan isn't even considered a mega city, in China! (it's just the one I know, that's why I mention it)
Maybe we need something that will let us overlay population density maps, not just geographic boundaries
Pretty sure the entire point of the original thing was specifically to see those geographic boundaries though
But if part of this is sparsely-populated farmland, being able to compare population density might give us a better picture of where the people really are. It wouldn’t necessarily help us visually compare population, since London doesn’t seem to have a lot of high rise residential buildings, but maybe give a better idea of the sprawl.
I think just looking at the road network gives you fairly nice, clearly delineated areas.
Paris has got this concept of intra-muros (within the walls) and extra-muros and the limit of this area is the ring road around it. And if you look at your favourite map software you can see the 10km wide circle clear as day. Then one other ring further out (about 20km wide), then a third about 40km wide, a bit more patchy, the circle isn't perfect or complete, but still the area is clear enough.
I believe you can see this growth ring structure too, if you look at London and probably a lot of other historic cities.