Demographics of The United States - Cities

Cities

See also: List of United States cities by population and Cities and metropolitan areas of the United States

The United States has dozens of major cities, including 8 of the 60 "global cities" of all types, with three in the "alpha" group of global cities: New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. As of 2011, the United States had 51 metropolitan areas with a population of over 1,000,000 people each. (See Table of United States Metropolitan Statistical Areas.)

As of 2011, about 250 million Americans live in or around urban areas. That means more than three-quarters of the U.S. population shares just about three percent of the U.S. land area.

The following table shows the populations of the top ten metropolitan areas, as of the 2010 Census.

Leading population centers
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Rank Core city Metro area pop. Metropolitan Statistical Area Region

New York City


Los Angeles
1 New York 19,015,900 New York–Northern New Jersey–Long Island, NY–NJ–PA MSA Northeast
2 Los Angeles 12,944,801 Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana, CA MSA West
3 Chicago 9,504,753 Chicago–Joliet–Naperville, IL–IN–WI MSA Midwest
4 Dallas 6,526,548 Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington, TX MSA South
5 Houston 6,086,538 Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown, TX MSA South
6 Philadelphia 5,992,414 Philadelphia–Camden–Wilmington, PA–NJ–DE–MD MSA Northeast
7 Washington, D.C. 5,703,948 Washington, DC–VA–MD–WV MSA South
8 Miami 5,670,125 Miami–Fort Lauderdale–Pompano Beach, FL MSA South
9 Atlanta 5,359,205 Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Marietta, GA MSA South
10 Boston 4,591,112 Boston–Cambridge–Quincy, MA–NH MSA Northeast
based on the 2011 U.S. Population Estimate

Read more about this topic:  Demographics Of The United States

Famous quotes containing the word cities:

    “The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.”
    —John Ruskin (1819–1900)

    “In bombers named for girls, we burned
    The cities we had learned about in school—
    Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
    The people we had killed and never seen.”
    —Randall Jarrell (1914–1965)