Does Size Matter?

I have never been to Europe’s largest city, changing ‘planes doesn’t count, but I have visited sixteen out of the twenty largest by population.

1. Istanbul, 15,519,267
2. Moscow, 12,615,279
3. London, 9,126,366
4. St Petersburg, 5,383,890
5. Berlin, 3,748,148
6. Madrid, 3,223,334
7. Kiev, 2,950,800
8. Rome, 2,844,750
9. Paris, 2,140,526
10.Bucharest, 2,106,144
11. Minsk, 1,982,444
12. Vienna, 1,911,191
13. Hamburg, 1,899,160
14. Warsaw, 1,793,579
15. Budapest, 1,768,073
16. Barcelona, 1,636,762
17. Munich, 1,471,508
18. Kharkiv, 1,451,132
19. Milan, 1,404,239
20. Belgrade, 1,397,939

To put these numbers in context there are nineteen cities in China with populations in excess of five million but only one in the United States: New York, 8,336,817. America does not have as large a population as I expected: 328 million. China, a difficult to visualise, 1.4 billion. There is much to ponder, of greater importance than my city visits, as the geopolitical tectonic plates shift.

All of the above is a warm-up act. If Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has his way and builds a city state at the north end of the Red Sea it will be the same size as Belgium and thirty-three times bigger than New York City. Will his concept become reality? Probably not, or at least not on the scale he envisages, with oil prices at $50.

But stranger things have happened. Peter the Great, greatly pleased at having trashed the plucky but belligerent Swedes, decreed a city to be built on a swamp in his conquered territory, now in Russia. He wanted a “window on the West”. It’s now the 4th biggest city in Europe. Its architecture draws tourists, like me, but what will become of  the Crown Prince’s NEOM, as it’s so unpromisingly called, in four hundred years?

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
(Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley)