The 10 Largest Cities in Europe in 2025 (Based On 30km Population Circles)

Map created by Frierfjord1Which city is the biggest is always controversial.

Do you measure simply based on the city proper? Metropolitan area?

The map above attempts to solve that issue by looking at how many people live with 30km (18.6 miles) of the city centre of each European city. You can quibble that 30km is too much or not enough, but not on the general approach.

Here’s what the author of the map had to say about it:

Data Source: Population Around a Point. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/

Method: Different ways of counting – such as “within city limits”, urban areas or metro areas can give you totally different numbers and rankings, when comparing cities.

My idea with this data visualization is to compare Europe’s 10 biggest cities, using “population circles” – basically drawing a 30km ring around the city center.

In every case, I’ve tried to maximize the population of each city, finding the “best possible circle” (within reason). I tried different km-boundaries, but when comparing these numbers with other sources, it seems that 30km best encapsulate cities of this size (5-15M).

For smaller cities in the 1-2 million population range, such as Stockholm or Copenhagen, a smaller radius of 15-20km seems more adequate.

1. Moscow (15.3M)
2. Istanbul** (13.3M)
3. London (11.2M)
4. Paris (10.4M)
5. Madrid (6.9M)
6. Saint Petersburg (5.7M)
7. Barcelona (5.4M)
8. Ruhr Area* (5.3M)
9. Milan (4.9M)
10. Berlin (4.4M)

*About the Ruhr Area: The Polycentric Ruhr Area is a tricky one with this approach. I considered two methods: Draw the population circle around the largest city (Dortmund) or simply try to find the maximum amount of people within a population circle. The first approach gives you ca. 3.300.000 around Dortmund, and the latter approach (setting the point south of Essen and maximizing the population, which I chose to go with) gives you ca. 5.300.000.

**About Istanbul: ca. 35 percent of the population lives in Asia. I chose to include the whole of Istanbul, instead of excluding the ones living on the Asian continent.  Istanbul would still be in the top 10 with around 8.8M, even when excluding the part of the population living on the Asian side.

Who would be 11-15(?): Birmingham (ca. 3.8M), Napoli (ca. 3.8M), Manchester (3.7M), Rome (3.6M) and Athens (3.5M).

Surprised by the results?