> > Yeah, Edmonton has a LOT of suburbs. When added all together, the greater Edmonton area has over a million people. Without counting the suburbs though, Edmonton only has about 600 000 or so.

This seems to be a big difference in how people define cities... Auckland is, for all practical purposes, entirely suburban. It wouldn't occur to me to try to separate the number of people who live in the city from those who live in the suburbs, because the *city* part, ie the couple of blocks in the middle where there are skyscrapers, isn't where anybody lives. Oh, there are some apartment buildings there, but nothing even *close* to how many people would live in apartments in a comparatively sized US city.

It's population *density* rather than size which makes city life bearable or otherwise. We've got a million people in Auckland, but spread out over twice the land area of London. (Or so I've heard.)

Brunnen-"or it was 1.5 times the land area of some other humungous city...or something... but you get the idea"G