Talk:List of metropolitan areas in Pakistan

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These population figures are underestimated. Karachi has a population of 15,000,000/+ and Lahore has 8,000,000/+. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.136.18.4 (talk) 14:27, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the recent population is different, the population in the article is 2005 est. I'll update it once I find an updated source. Marsa Lahminal (talk) 12:37, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Where does this figure for Karachi come from? At over 29 million, it would be the 2nd most populous in the world. Jakaloke (talk) 23:06, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

I've reverted the vandal. Elockid ^(Talk) 01:51, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Scope?

This list on 1 April was turned from a list of metropolitan areas into a list of districts, based on 1998 census information. The pre-1 April reference is broken beyond repair, and I couldn't find an alternative. Thus I wouldn't want to revert to what amounts to basically unverifiable information that probably strongly depends on the definition of "metropolitan area", which seems to be a term not in official use in Pakistan. On the other hand, we have a much more complete list of districts of Pakistan, which would be the natural place for district-based information, and a list of most populous cities in Pakistan, too (also based on 1998 census data). So what should be done to this list? Merge it to the district list? Huon (talk) 13:34, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

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Redirect

Due to the absence of any reliable sources and of even a definition of what constitutes a "metropolitan area" in the context of Pakistan, with no improvement for almost a year, I have redirected this list to the somewhat better-developed list of most populous cities in Pakistan even though that one has severe original research problems, too. At least there are sources that document the population of Pakistani cities. Huon (talk) 15:38, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Islamabad - Rawalpindi vs Faisalabad

These are two different cities so Faisalabad should be above them and the figures for Islamabad and Rawlapindi should be separated. --FN777 (talk) 14:09, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

I have merged this article into "List of cities in Pakistan by population"

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was to keep and improve the existing article. -- Abbasi786786 (talk) 14:29, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

---

Today I merged the article "List of metropolitan areas in Pakistan" into "List of cities in Pakistan by population" because there isn't any definition for what classifies as a Metropolitan area in Pakistan. The article just took totals from districts, many of which have multiple cities and definitely do not classify as metropolitan areas on their own, and since there are no reliable sources to calculate total populations of actual metropolitan areas in Pakistan, I redirected that article into this one today. --Abbasi786786 (talk) 20:31, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

Your, one claim is right and I agreed with it that districts can't be considered as metropolitan area as they are not classified officially by the Government of Pakistan. But I disagree with your 2nd claim in which you stated that there are more than one city in districts so it can't be considered metropolitan area. In largest metropolitan areas of the world, there are also multiple cities in them. Greater Tokyo Area is the largest metropolitan area of the world and it contains 6 cities (Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki etc). Just like in this list, Gujranwala District has been considered as metropolitan area and it also has 3 famous cities in it (Gujranwala, Kamoke, Wazirabad). The largest city is Gujranwala so district is named with Gujranwala just like Greater Tokyo Area is named with its largest city (Tokyo). In this Pakistani list, each metropolitan area has a city proper population of at least 500,000. I can mention more than 50 metropolitan areas around the globe having multiple cities in them. Innocent Paki (talk) 18:58, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't properly clarify what I was saying. I agree that metropolitan areas can have many cities (in fact I live in a suburb of a major city that's considered its own city), but what I mean is that we cannot classify every single city in a district as a part of a metropolitan area. One example is the city of Hasilpur (population 115,536) in Bahawalpur District. There are over 100 kilometers of rural land between the city of Hasilpur and Bahawalpur. Hasilpur is closer to both Bahawalnagar and Vehari, and Bahawalpur is closer to Multan than it is to Hasilpur. No one is talking about the Multan-Bahawalpur metropolitan area, but every urban area in Bahawalpur district (including Hasilpur), a district spanning an area the size of the U.S. state of West Virginia, has been merged into Bahawalpur in this article as the metro area of "Bahawalpur", which now has a population of 3,668,106 and is the tenth most populous metropolitan area in Pakistan (according to this article at least). Then after this you got "Sialkot", "Gujranwala", and "Quetta", the ninth, fifth, and eleventh-largest metro areas in Pakistan respectively (again, according to this article), where the population of the entire district was used as the metro population (every single person in the district). The same happened with Faisalabad, Multan, Peshawar, Sargodha, and Hyderabad.

Anyway, if we want to keep this article up, we need real sources with a consistent methodology. Demographia, the U.N.'s urbanization prospects and citypopulation.de's 2020 estimates seem like good starts for something of this type (we can't use any PBS stats because they don't measure anything (or at least have publicly available data) relating to metropolitan area populations. The problem with this, though, is that the data found on all of those sources have taken data directly from the city limits and have extrapolated it a few years (with the notable exception of Rawalpindi-Islamabad in Demographia and citypopulation.de). You can see this with the U.N.'s Urbanization Prospects (which claims to measure urban agglomerations). If you go for a data query to fetch the populations of every major city in Pakistan in 2017, you can see how close the populations found there are to the populations found within the city limits. In Demographia's estimates, when you go in the notes, the only difference between their estimates and the city limit's estimates are that Kamoki's population was included into Gujranwala's and that Rawalpindi-Islamabad exists. --Abbasi786786 (talk) 20:34, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

With all of these data deficiencies, I honestly think the best solution would be to redirect this article to the article "List of cities in Pakistan by population" and add a note to that page about the metro area of Rawalpindi-Islamabad (which seems to be the only metro area that, on all sources, has a significantly different population than that of it's constituent cities' city limits. --Abbasi786786 (talk) 20:34, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

@Innocent Paki, Lithopsian, Ytpks896, 117.102.2.25, Johnandbob, Meatsgains, MarnetteD, Khestwol, Islescape, 103.255.4.88, Green Giant, and Lepricavark: I've pinged the person I'm replying to, everyone who's edited the article in June 2020 so far, and the ten editors who have the highest authorship attribution over here to have a discussion on the merger of this article. --Abbasi786786 (talk) 20:34, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

I have formally proposed this merge, which may attract more interest to the discussion. It will also make any consensus at the end of the discussion hard to disagree with. However, it does strike me that what you really want is simply to delete this article and replace it with a redirect. Is there any content you actually want to merge? Lithopsian (talk) 19:35, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

@Lithopsian: Yes, I do propose to delete this page's contents and replace it with a redirect. IMO, the only useful info this page has relates to Islamabad-Rawalpindi, and we should add something on that to the page we are merging to. Maybe a footnote or a new section. What do you think? --Abbasi786786 (talk) 20:34, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

I don't have enough knowledge to comment on what should happen. I was just concerned that there wasn't going to be any meaningful content to be merged. In that case, this article would effectively be deleted and that would require an AfD discussion (since a simple redirect has been disputed). Lithopsian (talk) 20:41, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

At first, I was in favour of redirecting the article to List of cities in Pakistan by population but now after having some proper research I am against it. Abbasi786786 claims that district can't be considered metropolitan area but many metropolitan areas around the globe span over a district, some even on multiple districts. For example, Karachi, the largest metropolitan area of Pakistan has 6 districts (Karachi Central, Karachi West, Malir District, Korangi District, Karachi East, Karachi South) in it. He has also claimed that there should be not any distance between cities and some rural settlements between them. This claim is also not right according to me as Malir District of Karachi covers an area of 2,635 km²[1] which is about 70% of Karachi but has a population of just 1.1 million (according to 2017 Census of Pakistan)[2] which is just 8% of total population of Karachi. There will be definitely long distances between the towns of Malir if we calculates it's population density which is just 450/km². Abbasi786786 also claimed that there should be not multiple cities in the district but I gave him example of Greater Tokyo Area, which he accepted in his recent comment. He also states that Bahawalpur metropolitan area spans over an area of about 11,000 km² and it is too much to be considered a metropolitan area, so I want to tell that New York Metropolitan area also spans over an area of about 11,000 km²[3]. The only difference is that population density of New York is 1800/km² while that of Bahawalpur is 350/km², which can be negligible as that of Malir District is also 450/km². I totally agree with one of his claim that Government has not officially used the term metropolitan area anywhere. One thing I want to add in this regard is that government also didn't release any report on List of largest cities by population within city limits but it just has released population figures of each and every city, tehsil, district and division individually. These types of lists were formed by different websites (like citypopulation.de etc) from official population figures. My personal opinion is that we should not delete this article but leave it as it is. Moreover, all the cities in this list have been declared as metropolitan corporations officially except Sialkot (i.e Municipal Corporation). Definition of metropolitan area is as follow:

A metropolitan area is a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and housing.

This list also falls on the definition of metropolitan area as all the capital cities of these districts are densely populated, each with a population of over 500,000 and are declared metropolitan corporations officially which is the highest level of local government in Pakistan. Innocent Paki (talk) 23:57, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

@Innocent Paki:

You have misunderstood me regarding my view on districts not being metropolitan areas. I think that districts should not be used as the basis for defining metropolitan areas. For some districts, this works out well, for example Lahore District, which has been entirely urbanized even to the point where you could consider Sheikhupura a satellite city of Lahore. Another place this works well is in Karachi, where the six districts of Karachi can work together and are deeply interconnected. This does not work for the vast majority of districts, though. Hasilpur is just not as close to Bahawalpur as Malir is to Karachi (it really helps that Karachi has some 15 million people in its urban areas while Bahawalpur has only 700,000). Also, a minor correction, the only cities that have the status of "Metropolitan Corporation" in Pakistan are Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi". Faisalabad is a municipal corporation (M. CORP as opposed to METRO. CORP), as is Bahawalpur, Sailkot, Quetta, and even Turbat and Chaman in Balochistan (there are 20 in the four provinces total). I just don't think that Kech District should be called the Turbat Metropolitan area, if we aren't calling Swat District the Kabal-Mingora-Bahrain metropolitan area (BTW, none of those cities are considered Municipal Corporations, even Mingora, which is far larger than Turbat and more than double the size of Chaman). There can be the possibility that metro areas can straddle the borders of two districts and have territory and people on both sides, but not make up the entire two districts in its area as well. Also, I noticed how you compared Bahawalpur to New York, but that is a problem for many reasons. Population density isn't a non-factor the way you say it is, as it gives the region enough people to stay connected as a part of the same unified city. Bahawalpur District, at its core, and in total, has a population of 700,000 people living in the city limits and 3,500,000 people living in the districts, and is 70% rural. In stark contrast, NYC's metro area is a good 80% - 90% urban, has 8,000,000 people living in the city limits and 20,000,000 in the metro! Multan-Bahawalpur (focusing on the urban areas and the land between the two) and Lahore-Gujranwala seem like much better candidates for metropolitan areas. Even Malir is some 60% urban (most of those people, though, live in the cantonment).

Anyway, I think leaving the article as it is is a horrible idea. The article is misleading at best and needs some rules applied to it. The current mess of data cannot stay, but I'm still willing to compromise. We can keep the page, but we should use different sources and portray data for all of them as is done on the page Megacities. One column for city limits, one column for districts (or tehsils, because some 30 - 50% of districts in Pakistan have more than a million people), one column for the citypopulation.de estimates, and another for Demographia's estimates (which honestly correspond to the city limits very well so if you have better ideas, pass them along). It doesn't need to be ordered by population. The title doesn't say "by population". What do you think about this idea? --Abbasi786786 (talk) 11:43, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

@Abbasi786786:

Hi Abbasi786786! I respect your point of view. But I wanna tell you something more. At present there are about 11 metropolitan corporations. Each divisional capital of Punjab, Pakistan has been upgraded to Metropolitan Corporation by local government act 2020. Anyways, this is not the right place to dicuss it. You've given the examples of Mingora District etc, these districts capitals has just the population of about 200,000 to 300,000 and are not included in the list. Also, these districts doesn't fall properly on the definition of Metropolitan area as their capital cities are not densily populated urban-core. This list only includes the cities having population more than 500,000 that are only 13 in Pakistan from Karachi to Sialkot. Real definition of Municipal Corporation is that the city having population more than 500,000 but in Pakistan many cities (having population between 200,000 to 300,000) has also been upgraded to Municipal Corporation for the development of region. I didn't agree with your suggestion of adding district populations in the List of Pakistani cities by population because there are only 30 to 40 district capitals in the list, rest of all are tehsils. So, will we leave the column of district population, if city is not a district but a tehsil? Also Karachi has 6 districts, so how the column of Karachi will be called as district population (as it is a division)? And you have said that Bahawalpur has 70% of rural population, so it shouldn't be considered metropolitan area. Sorry but I haven't find this type of rule anywhere that metropolitan area can't have much rural settlements. In short, I have agreed with some of your points to some extends.

Now, I am suggesting five possible solutions based on my own perspective:

1. Your suggestion is also good but there's already city proper population column present in the list, so the column of citypopulation.de estimates is not needed. Based on your suggestion and my own perspective, I have summarized this possible rule. Write this sentence in the start of the list All these metropolitan areas have city proper population of atleast 500,000. This will help to clarify that this list doesn't include Districts like Turbat, Swat but only contains significant districts with big capital cities from Karachi to Sialkot. In addition to this create and new column of notes and add the name of tehsil cities in it like Samundri, Jaranwala in Faisalabad, Kamoke, Wazirabad in Gujranwala, Bhalwal, Kot Momin in Sargodha etc. It will describe them all just like Greater Tokyo Area, that has six cities in it. Moreover, create another column of urban population of district alongwith city proper population so it will clear all the misconceptions and will explain the urban population of the districts.

2. Create a new article named List of most populous urban areas of Pakistan and add the urban population of districts in it. This will reduce the population of districts like Faisalabad, Multan, Sargodha by 60%. But population will be more than the city proper and concept of some region beyond city limits will remain alive.

3. All the cities like Multan, Sargodha, Sialkot are controlled by Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA). And tehsils are very small as compared to districts, but larger than city proper, so we can also add the tehsil populations in the respective columns of metropolitan areas instead of district populations.

4. Only add the 11 metropolitan corporations of the country (Karachi, Islamabad and 9 divisional capitals of Punjab) as metropolitan area alongwith their district and city proper population.

5. Only add the 11 metropolitan corporations of the country (Karachi, Islamabad and 9 divisional capitals of Punjab) as metropolitan areas with their city proper population as mentioned in citypopulation.de as that is the only population covered by metropolitan corporation.

Innocent Paki (talk) 12:56, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

@Innocent Paki:

But I wanna tell you something more. At present there are about 11 metropolitan corporations. Each divisional capital of Punjab, Pakistan has been upgraded to Metropolitan Corporation by local government act 2020.

Thank you for the information! I was not aware of this change. I was earlier going off the three for the 2017 census. So now I'm going to discuss the five ideas you present, their benefits, and their flaws.

4. Only add the 11 metropolitan corporations of the country (Karachi, Islamabad and 9 divisional capitals of Punjab) as metropolitan area alongwith their district and city proper population.

5. Only add the 11 metropolitan corporations of the country (Karachi, Islamabad and 9 divisional capitals of Punjab) as metropolitan areas with their city proper population as mentioned in citypopulation.de as that is the only population covered by metropolitan corporation.

I'll start with these two because straight off the bat, I don't think we should use these ideas. This would immediately leave out Hyderabad, Peshawar, Quetta, and arguably Sukkur and Larkana as well (those two both had populations between 490,000 and 500,000), and I think we should keep them in anyway.

1. Your suggestion is also good but there's already city proper population column present in the list, so the column of citypopulation.de estimates is not needed. Based on your suggestion and my own perspective, I have summarized this possible rule. Write this sentence in the start of the list All these metropolitan areas have city proper population of atleast 500,000. This will help to clarify that this list doesn't include Districts like Turbat, Swat but only contains significant districts with big capital cities from Karachi to Sialkot. In addition to this create and new column of notes and add the name of tehsil cities in it like Samundri, Jaranwala in Faisalabad, Kamoke, Wazirabad in Gujranwala, Bhalwal, Kot Momin in Sargodha etc. It will describe them all just like Greater Tokyo Area, that has six cities in it. Moreover, create another column of urban population of district alongwith city proper population so it will clear all the misconceptions and will explain the urban population of the districts.

This is a good idea, but for a clarification, when I say the citypopulation.de estimates, I mean these ones used on the worldwide page. They do have a problem of only showing the nine most populous cities, leaving out Bahawalpur and Sargodha, which both deserve a mention. Another option is to use Demographia and their estimates or the U.N.'s estimates, which are both pretty detailed (Demographia goes all the way down to Sukkur, Larkana, and Sheikhupura while the U.N.'s WUP Prospects 2018 database has data for every city with a city proper population above 300,000 excluding Mingora, but it has Rawalpindi and Islamabad separate, and takes data directly from the city proper) and have data for the year 2020.

2. Create a new article named List of most populous urban areas of Pakistan and add the urban population of districts in it. This will reduce the population of districts like Faisalabad, Multan, Sargodha by 60%. But population will be more than the city proper and concept of some region beyond city limits will remain alive.

3. All the cities like Multan, Sargodha, Sialkot are controlled by Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA). And tehsils are very small as compared to districts, but larger than city proper, so we can also add the tehsil populations in the respective columns of metropolitan areas instead of district populations.

I very much like these two ideas, but I think we can combine data from the two to make a table with more columns. I'll have a concept idea that'll be ready in a little while. If you OK it, I think we should use it on the table. --Abbasi786786 (talk) 13:57, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

@Innocent Paki:

What do you think of this? We'll have sufficient explanation at the top, and maybe we can have one of those floating rank things on the left side.

@Abbasi786786:

Hi Abbasi786786! To be honest, I am very well impressed by your work and wanna thank you for this incredible work. I just want to suggest few changes in it which I'll suggest ASAP. Cheers! Innocent Paki (talk) 18:37, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi Abbasi786786! I have made some changes into the draft made by you. Let me explain what I've done and why.

First of all, I've removed the reference column and used a single reference, written with population at the top of the list that will cover each entry of the column. Secondly, I've added Karachi, Lahore & Islamabad-Rawalpindi Metropolitan Area to suggest how they can be added in the list as they have different case as comparison to others. I've used word Karachi instead of Karachi Division and Lahore instead of Lahore District because these two megacities itself forms the metropolitan area within their city limits and doesn't have any satellite cities/suburbs. Karachi has some rural settlements of 1.1 million that makes its metro population 16 million. Thirdly, I've changed the column of Tehsil into Urban population as mentioned in the given source because if we consider column of tehsil population then we can't cover the principal cities that spans over more than one tehsil like Karachi, Lahore. Moreover, in satellite cities, we should only add the cities that are tehsil headquarters and are located outside of principal city. All tehsils headquarters of Karachi and Lahore are within city limits, so we'll leave their row blank. At last, I wanna tell that if we'll agree on one concept we'll also add the columns of images and total area (km²) as it is given in the present existing list. Cheers, Innocent Paki (talk) 20:51, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Abbasi, I also have new suggestion. Add Division population for Karachi which is 16 million, District population for Lahore that is 11 million, combined city proper populations of Islamabad & Rawalpindi that becomes 3 million and the city proper populations of all other cities that have a city proper population of exceeding 500,000. We can also add Sukkur and Larkana as they both have population of about 490,000. I think, this is best solution as there are no long and unpopulated distances between them and can be considered densely populated urban core. The list will include top 15 cities from List of largest cities in Pakistan and will have just following two changes:

• Population of Karachi as 16 million instead of 14.9 million
• City proper populations of Islamabad and Rawalpindi together that becomes 3 million.

Innocent Paki (talk) 21:06, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

@Abbasi786786:

What do you think of this another concept that I have added below your list. This new one shows city proper populations and doesn't includes large districts like Bahawalpur having an area of about 24,000 km². We can also include Sukkur and Larkana in it, by using the method of cities having exceeding population of 500,000. This will differ from List of cities by population as it contains every city having population of 100,000 but this list will contain cities having exceeding population of 500,000 and these cities will be called as metropolitan area.

Innocent Paki (talk) 23:48, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Abbasi786786, I think it's a final decision that we should not merge this article and keep it under its present name. So, the tag of redirection has to be remove now. I have made the changes in the article but these changes are not final, you can still suggest something and give you precious opinion. After final decision, I'll correct the metro population of every city especially of Islamabad and Rawalpindi which now I think is misguiding alot as 7.4 million is a very enormous figure. In short, I'm waiting for your opinion. Innocent Paki (talk) 21:15, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

@Innocent Paki: Sounds good to me. I'm gonna remove the tags -- Abbasi786786 (talk) 18:51, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.