Maybe they meant big as in "big in Japan", if you know what I mean :D the techno scene in Paris, although undoubtedly vibrant, is definitely less renowned than Berlin's.
Those are urban areas. If you instead count by city limits, Berlin is bigger by a large margin [1]. This is the perpetual problem with defining "biggest" - to some the urban area of Paris might still be "Paris" but the vast majority of it is outside the city limits.
This insistence on these officialities is frustrating, because the city limits are pretty arbitrary and have no bearing on the discussion at hand. Did you know that London (City of London) has less than 10 000 inhabitants? Apart from being a legal and historical peculiarity, it's largely irrelevant in most discussions.
For this discussion (cultural centers of Europe), Greater Paris, Greater London and Berlin (they have roughly similar areas) are what you want to compare, and Berlin is clearly the smallest one population-wise out of these three (and it's not even close).
London and City of London are two different entities entirely so that comparison does not work. London at its largest refers to the 32 boroughs and City of London that makes up Greater London, not the City, to those of us who live here. At it's smallest, it still refers to most of that, not just City.
If we want to shorten the name of City of London, the short form is the City, not London. The only people who ever calls City by the name of London is people who have just learnt of the oddity.
Greater London makes up the formal boundaries of London. It's the legal and administrative boundary, and the city limits of London. Unusually, unlike the city limits of many other cities, you'll find plenty of people including people who live here who not quite consider the outer parts to be part of London. People where I live sometimes still consider it part of Surrey even though it's been part of London since 1965.
There are forests and agricultural areas almost entirely separating parts of the borough I live in from the rest of London.
Yet in other areas, the Greater London urban area expands well past what anyone would call London, including e.g. entirely separate towns in other counties, like Watford in Hertfordshire, Gravesend in Kent, Epsom and Guildford in Surrey.
So yes, these comparisons are tricky but that is the point.
E.g culturally, London is likely reasonably described as smaller than it's city limits, while indeed some other cities are often larger than them, but rarely as large as the urban area they are within. It's extremely common for towns on the outskirts of large cities to have their own separate identities and not be considered part of the adjoining city, but still form part of the same urban area.
Depending on what you want to compare and which cities you are comparing, different measures will be more or less appropriate, and may require different considerations.
Unfortunately, nobody took into account the difficulty of talking about this to people online when the County of London was created (totally excluding the City of London) in 1889, nor when the City of London and the London County Council boroughs were finally merged into Greater London 1965 (only to be separated again in 1986 when the Greater London Council was abolished, before being merged again in 2000 when the current Greater London Authority was created).
[And, yes, this means there was a 14 year period when the UK had a capital without a government, nor indeed any administrative unit - effectively "(Greater) London" as a political and administrative entity didn't exist during that period -, largely for political reasons - Thatchers government was strongly at odds with the then particularly left wing Greater London Council]
But really, the reason for contracting City of London to "City" rather than London is to minimise confusion, because it means London fairly unambiguously, though not entirely, refers to Greater London.
City limits are important because each city in a metro area could have different zoning and noise ordinance laws. Or even just law enforcement that's more or less strict in one city than another. This can help to shape the culture in each city in a metropolitan area.
But Berlin stops entirely at its city limits. There is almost nothing beyond it. That's just a consequence of its history with the east/west divide.
More people live in Munich's metropolitan area (i.e. where underground and overground take you) than Berlin. Still, Berlin feels like a proper city and Munich like a large village.
Berlin vs Munich is where your metric (people who live inside city boundaries) works to describe the metropolitan effect.
Paris, on the other hand, is on another level entirely. When you travel from Paris to Berlin, Berlin feels like a small town. And here, the metric of people who live inside city boundaries just doesn't describe the feeling of the cities at all.
Sure, but the point is you will get different results depending on which metric you pick. It's not that one is inherently more correct than the other.
Often there are cultural aspects at play too. I live in London. I also live in Croydon - it'd be one of the largest cities in the UK in its own right if it was separate to London (and on more than one occasion the council has tried to make that happen). Most of the borough is part of the same urban area, but some are fairly well separated. Several parts of the borough are really separate towns, separated not just from London but from Croydon by "relatively rural" land (by our standards), with their own town centers, train stations, and culturally distinct.
All of this is within the administrative city limits of Greater London ("London" doesn't really exist as an entity of its own - and before anyone else says City of London, that's one tiny constituent part of Greater London - nobody means City when they say London)
So when you say Berlin, everything might be within city limits, when you say London, odds are you wouldn't think of every part within the actual city limits as part of it, nor even a city, but the Greater London urban area includes tendrils extending beyond Greater London too that nobody other than perhaps extra audacious real estate agents would call London. When you say Paris, odds are you might include some parts beyond the formal city limits but very unlikely the entire urban area.
Even then, you won't even get people living each place to agree where the line goes.
The urban area is what matters. Paris is larger than Berlin and the largest in the EU.
Paris has the specificity of having small limits for the city proper but it does not make sense to use that metric for comparison because nowadays the city only stops at the administrative limits for adminsitrative purposes and nothing else. You won't even notice you've crossed the limit if not for the ring road.
In fact, Moscow is also larger than Berlin however you look at it we we're talking about "continental Europe" (which I take as a way to exclude London, which is also larger than Berlin...).
The urban area of Paris ("aire d'attraction de Paris") extends well past the areas where people would consider that they are "in Paris".
It might well still be the biggest in the EU if you drew limits based on what people considered part of the city - I don't know - but it certainly would not be as big as its urban area.
In fact, I'd argue you're unlikely to find any major city anywhere in the world where most people would agree that every part of the outer boundaries of the urban area are part of "the city" (or even "a city"; parts of urban areas will still often be considered fairly rural by those who live there or in the nearby city) even in a loose colloquial or cultural sense. Even coming close would be exceedingly rare. This because the ways urban areas are designated by design tends to include commuter regions far outside, with their own identities, and often very separated from the biggest city in the urban area.
So while going by city limits will be misleading, so will going by urban area. Unfortunately, no single metric will be accurate for these things.
Just to point that "aire d'attraction" is not the same as the urban area. It is the area of influence and extends much further than the urban area.
I live outside of London, howver you define 'London', but still in London's area of influence considering how many people commute into London from here every day.
It's a tricky one, because by some definitions it fits what is often called a metropolitan area, but there's no formal, objective definition of either urban or metropolitan area that is universally accepted. You're right it's probably wider than most uses of urban areas in English.
At the same time it's specifically meant to be aligned to OECD and Eurostats definition of a Functional Urban Area, which is a definition meant to ensure comparable statistics across countries, which neither the "old style" urban nor metropolitan area terms provide...
Which really just goes back to the main point that you can get pretty much whichever result you want here unless you narrow it down to the specific criteria that actually matter to you...
It is bigger than Paris if you don't count the surrounding area around Paris, which isn't Paris. This article isn't correct as it is taking into account the surrounding area.
At least Moscow is bigger in terms of within it's city limits too, though, but then unless we want to be pedantic we get into what the person meant by "continental Europe". To what extent people colloquially refer to any part of Russia when talking about Europe varies greatly.
Most of us are no longer in school, and lots of people forget that as soon as they learn it, but it's also entirely irrelevant to the question of how the term was used. "Europe" is very commonly used as a synonym for the EEA or even just EU many places today, no matter how incorrect that is.
and lots of people forget that as soon as they learn it
Great, then we don't need to hear from these people. They don't need opinions or view points about things they were never intersted in, never learned about, and couldn't be bothered to remember.
"Europe" is very commonly used as a synonym for the EEA or even just EU many places today, no matter how incorrect that is.
The term was very specifically "Continental Europe".
It's not up to you to decide whether or not people express opinions about whatever they please, and frankly that sentiment comes across as deeply arrogant and unpleasant. if that's the tack you want to take you can continue this discussion with someone else.
> The term was very specifically "Continental Europe".
And "continental" in Europe very often is just used as a "but not the UK" modifier.
You can argue about the correct meaning all you want, but it is entirely irrelevant to whether or not that is how it was actually being used.
Also comparing city populations within city limits is exactly being too pedantic, because Paris is one example where the administrative city is much smaller than the real city.
It's definitely not as big as those in terms of surface area. But it's quite spread out and what counts as the "center" is a very loosely defined notion that is actually quite large compared to all those cities.
There's a ring of sbahn commuter rail around the center. From east to west that's about 16km and from north to south about 10km. Anything inside that could definitely be considered as the center. Walking east to west would take about three hours or so. You'll pass through a lot of interesting neighborhoods, each with their own little centers. You'll pass lots of landmarks. The former east and west berlin "centers" are about 9 km apart. A lot of the traditional landmarks and hotspots are spread out throughout that zone. And then you have a lot of gentrified spots that are becoming hotspots in their own right.
I use the word center loosely of course because there really is no such thing in Berlin. It's all spread out over a huge area. There are probably about well over a dozen areas that can lay claim to being a center of something. And frankly, most of the interesting bits are outside of what the tourists flock to these days.
Outside the ring, the city continues in pretty much all directions for quite some distance. And some of those areas are quite nice as well. But most would not consider that the center. I've lived here for about fifteen years and there are huge parts of the city that I've simply never even been to because it would take like an hour plus to get there and there isn't much in terms of landmarks, etc. to draw me there.
Technically Berlin is actually a city state (within the federation of Germany) that includes the capital and a few suburbs. Total population is still smaller than it was before WW II (3.5M people vs 4M people then). So there's a lot of open space, huge parks, two decommissioned airports (Tempelhof, Tegel), etc. all within the city limits. Tempelhof is huge. About 2km by 2km of open space in the middle of a big city with two decomissioned runways. It was the site of the cold war air bridge. You have Kreuzberg to the north, Neuköln to the east and Alt Tempelhof just outside the ring on the south west side. And that's just one corner of the city. All in former west Berlin.
The population is growing for the last decades at a pretty decent rate (about 50K new people per year or so). But it will take some time to catch up to pre WW II era levels.
It seems a constant that raves were better 10 years ago before everything became commercialized.
"It use to be about the music"
I remember hearing this 25 years ago.
Of course, what happens is that you get people who have been going to these things for 10 years and the novelty has worn off along with being 10 years older.
Most fun activities are better when you are 10 years younger with no expectations.
Berlin is the biggest city in continental Europe, there's a lot of everything and there'll always be hidden little nooks.