Metropolis in the context of City

Mainland is defined as "relating to or forming the main part of a country or continent, not including the islands around it [regardless of status under territorial jurisdiction by an entity]." The term is often politically, economically and/or demographically more significant than politically associated remote territories, such as exclaves or oceanic islands situated outside the continental shelf.

In geography, "mainland" can denote the continental part of any polity or the main island within an island nation. In geopolitics, "mainland" is sometimes used interchangeably with terms like metropole as an antonym to overseas territories. In the sense of "heartland", mainland is the opposite of periphery. In some language a separate concept of "mainland" is missing and is replaced with a "continental portion".

A conurbation is a region consisting of a number of metropolises, cities, large towns, and other urban areas which, through population growth and physical expansion, have merged to form one continuous urban or industrially developed area. In most cases, a conurbation is a polycentric urbanised area in which transportation has developed to link areas. They create a single urban labour market or travel to work area.

Conurbations often emerged in coal-mining regions during the period of the Industrial Revolution.Patrick Geddes coined the term in his book Cities in Evolution (1915). He drew attention to the ability of the new technology at the time of electric power and motorised transport to allow cities to spread and agglomerate together, and gave as examples "Midlandton" in England, the Ruhr in Germany, Randstad in the Netherlands, and the Northeastern Seaboard in the United States.

Greek colonisation refers to the expansion of Archaic Greeks, particularly during the 8th–6th centuries BC, across the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.

The Archaic expansion differed from the Iron Age migrations of the Greek Dark Ages, in that it consisted of organised direction (see oikistes) away from the originating metropolis rather than the simplistic movement of tribes, which characterised the aforementioned earlier migrations. Many colonies, or apoikiai (Greek: ἀποικία, transl. "home away from home"), that were founded during this period eventually evolved into strong Greek city-states, functioning independently of their metropolis.

Rome is the capital city and most populated comune (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special comune named Roma Capitale with 2,746,984 residents in 1,287.36 km (497.1 sq mi), Rome is the third most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. The Metropolitan City of Rome Capital, with a population of 4,223,885 residents, is the most populous metropolitan city in Italy. Its metropolitan area is the third-most populous within Italy. Rome is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio (Latium), along the shores of the Tiber Valley. Vatican City (the smallest country in the world and headquarters of the worldwide Catholic Church under the governance of the Holy See) is an independent country inside the city boundaries of Rome, the only existing example of a country within a city. Rome is often referred to as the City of Seven Hills due to its geography, and also as the "Eternal City". Rome is generally considered to be one of the cradles of Western civilization and Western Christian culture, and the centre of the Catholic Church.

Rome's history spans 28 centuries. While Roman mythology dates the founding of Rome at around 753 BC, the site has been inhabited for much longer, making it a major human settlement for over three millennia and one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in Europe. The city's early population originated from a mix of Latins, Etruscans, and Sabines. Eventually, the city successively became the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and is regarded by many as the first-ever Imperial city and metropolis. It was first called The Eternal City (Latin: Urbs Aeterna; Italian: La Città Eterna) by the Roman poet Tibullus in the 1st century BC, and the expression was also taken up by Ovid, Virgil, and Livy. Rome is also called Caput Mundi (Capital of the World).

London is the capital and largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of 9.1 million people in 2024. Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Western Europe, with a population of 15.1 million. London stands on the River Thames in southeast England, at the head of a 50-mile (80 km) tidal estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a major settlement for nearly 2,000 years. Its ancient core and financial centre, the City of London, was founded by the Romans as Londinium and has retained its medieval boundaries. The City of Westminster, to the west of the City of London, has been the centuries-long host of the national government and parliament. London grew rapidly in the 19th century, becoming the world's largest city at the time. Since the 19th century the name "London" has referred to the metropolis around the City of London, historically split between the counties of Middlesex, Essex, Surrey, Kent and Hertfordshire, which since 1965 has largely comprised the administrative area of Greater London, governed by 33 local authorities and the Greater London Authority.

As one of the world's major global cities, London exerts a strong influence on world art, entertainment, fashion, commerce, finance, education, healthcare, media, science, technology, tourism, transport and communications. London is Europe's largest city economy and one of the world's major financial centres. London hosts Europe's largest concentration of higher education institutions, comprising over 50 universities and colleges and enrolling more than 500,000 students as at 2023. It is home to several of the world's leading academic institutions: Imperial College London, internationally recognised for its excellence in natural and applied sciences, and University College London (UCL), a comprehensive research-intensive university, consistently rank among the top ten globally. Other notable institutions include King's College London (KCL), highly regarded in law, humanities and health sciences; the London School of Economics (LSE), globally prominent in social sciences and economics; and specialised institutions such as the Royal College of Art (RCA), Royal Academy of Music (RAM), the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and London Business School (LBS). It is the most-visited city in Europe and has the world's busiest city airport system. The London Underground is the world's oldest rapid transit system.

Colonies in antiquity were post-Iron Age city-states founded from a mother-city or metropolis rather than from a territory-at-large. Bonds between a colony and its metropolis often remained close, and took specific forms during the period of classical antiquity.Generally, colonies founded by the ancient Phoenicians, Carthage, Rome, Alexander the Great and his successors remained tied to their metropolis, though Greek colonies of the Archaic and Classical eras were sovereign and self-governing from their inception. While earlier Greek colonies were often founded to solve social unrest in the mother-city by expelling a part of the population, Hellenistic, Roman, Carthaginian, and Han Chinese colonies served as centres for trade (entrepôts), expansion and empire-building.

A megalopolis (/ˌmɛɡəˈlɒpəlɪs/), also called a supercity or megaregion, is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on. They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities. The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth.

A megacity is a very large city, typically with a population of more than 10 million people. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) in its "World Urbanization Prospects" report defines megacities as urban agglomerations with over 10 million inhabitants. A University of Bonn report holds that they are "usually defined as metropolitan areas with a total population of 10 million or more people". Elsewhere in other sources, from five to eight million is considered the minimum threshold, along with a population density of at least 2,000 per square kilometre. The terms conurbation, metropolis, and metroplex are also applied to the latter.

The total number of megacities in the world varies between different sources and their publication dates. The world had 32 according to EU Global Human Settlement Layer (in 2024), 33 according to UN DESA (in 2025), 39 according to the OECD, 42 according to Demographia (in 2025), and 45 according to CityPopulation.de (in 2023). The later two add 13 additional cities that are calculated outside the range otherwise. In total, at most 53 unique places are mentioned as megacities across these sources, although some of these are just agglomerated differently between them. A good percentage of these urban agglomerations are in China and India. The other three-to-five countries with more than one megacity are Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, and the United States. African megacities are present in Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa; European megacities are present in France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey (also in Asia); megacities can be found in Latin America in the countries of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina.

Tyre is a city in Lebanon, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It was one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa, her brothers Cadmus and Phoenix, and Carthage's founder Dido (Elissa). The city has many ancient sites, including the Tyre Hippodrome, and was added as a whole to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1984. The historian Ernest Renan described it as "a city of ruins, built out of ruins".

Tyre is the fifth-largest city in Lebanon after Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, and Baalbek. It is the capital of the Tyre District in the South Governorate. There were approximately 200,000 inhabitants in the Tyre urban area in 2016, including many refugees, as the city hosts three of the twelve Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon: Burj El Shimali, El Buss, and Rashidieh.

Rawalpindi, colloquially known as Pindi, is the third-largest city in the Pakistani province of Punjab, serving as the principal commercial and industrial hub of northern Punjab. It is the fourth-most populous city in Pakistan and ranks as the world's third-largest Punjabi-speaking metropolis (after Lahore and Faisalabad). Located along the Soan River in north-western Punjab, Rawalpindi lies adjacent to Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, and the two are jointly known as the "twin cities".

Located on the Pothohar Plateau of northern Punjab — a region known for its ancient heritage, for instance the city of Taxila, a UNESCO World Heritage Site — Rawalpindi was founded in 1493 and remained a small town of little importance, with local Punjabi Muslim tribes indirectly ruling it for larger empires, up until 1765 when it was captured by the Bhangi Misl. During the Sikh era, Rawalpindi transitioned from a small regional town into one of the major Punjabi cities, becoming a hub of trade and military. The city also became a cosmopolitan hub, housing various ethnic minorities as immigrants and refugees alongside the native Punjabi majority.

There are eleven metropolitan regions in Germany consisting of the country's most densely populated cities and their catchment areas. They represent Germany's political, commercial and cultural centres. The eleven metropolitan regions in Germany were organised into political units for planning purposes.

Based on a narrower definition of metropolises commonly used to determine the metropolitan status of a given city, only four cities in Germany surpass the threshold of at least one million inhabitants within their administrative borders: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Cologne.

Lifestyle is the interests, opinions, behaviours, and behavioural orientations of an individual, group, or culture. The term "style of life" (German: Lebensstil) was introduced by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in his 1929 book, The Case of Miss R., with the meaning of "a person's basic character as established early in childhood". The broader sense of lifestyle as a "way or style of living" has been documented since 1961. Lifestyle is a combination of determining intangible or tangible factors. Tangible factors relate specifically to demographic variables, i.e. an individual's demographic profile, whereas intangible factors concern the psychological aspects of an individual such as personal values, preferences, and outlooks.

A rural environment has different lifestyles compared to an urban metropolis. Location is important even within an urban scope. The nature of the neighborhood in which a person resides affects the set of lifestyles available to that person due to differences between various neighborhoods' degrees of affluence and proximity to natural and cultural environments. For example, in areas near the sea, a surf culture or lifestyle can often be present.

Algiers is the capital city of Algeria, located on the Mediterranean Sea in the north-central portion of the country. In 2025, an estimated 4.325 million people resided within the urban area. Algiers is the largest city in Algeria, the third-largest city on the Mediterranean, the sixth-largest city in the Arab world, and the 29th-largest city in Africa by population. Algiers is the capital of the Algiers Province; it extends over many communes without having its own separate governing body. It extends along the Bay of Algiers surrounded by the Mitidja Plain and major mountain ranges. Its favorable location made it the center of Ottoman and French influences for the region, shaping it to be a diverse metropolis.

Algiers was formally founded in 972 AD by Buluggin ibn Ziri, though its history goes back to between 1200 and 250 BC as a Phoenician trading settlement. Over time, it came under the control of several powers, including Numidia, the Roman Empire, and various Islamic caliphates. In 1516, it became the capital of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers, a status it held until the French invasion in 1830, after which it served as the capital of French Algeria. During World War II, it briefly functioned as the administrative center of Free France from 1942 to 1944 before returning to French colonial rule. It has remained the capital of the modern Algerian state since the Algerian Revolution in 1962.