The following is a list of the largest satellite cities worldwide, with over 500,000 people. A satellite city is defined as subordinate to a central city in a business or infrastructure sense, and it may or may not have more population than the central city due to arbitrary municipal definitions.
Excluded are transborder agglomerations. In the Pop date column, C stands for census, P for provisional result, E for estimate. Although the list is ordered by population for ease of reference, the figures are not comparable with each other due to different dates and lack of updates by respective countries.
Satellite cities by population
Satellite cities are generally suburbs or bedroom communities[citation needed] but not always; an example is a capital that is dwarfed by a megacity. Large satellite cities may be as densely populated as a megacity.
Cities in mainland China are often defined as prefectures or counties; for the sake of simplicity, they are listed in a separate list as explained in the respective section.
The city of Pretoria, South Africa has an exceedingly large area of 6,298km2 (2,432sqmi), and as a national capital, it is hard to determine the boundaries between Pretoria's suburban areas and the suburbs of the nearby city of Johannesburg. Therefore, it is excluded here.
Malaysia has multiple types of local government, which confusingly overlap as the system was partially but not completely overhauled.
Local data may be outdated for many of the least-developed nations, and as such may not be comparable.
In both the People's Republic of China and Republic of China, the designation of "city" often corresponds to administrative units such as prefecture-level or county-level jurisdictions, rather than to contiguous urbanized areas. These jurisdictions typically cover vast territories that include not only the urban core but also extensive rural zones, townships, and even geographically distinct settlements. Consequently, entire metropolitan areas can fall within a single city’s administrative boundaries, and satellite cities may exist either within or adjacent to these jurisdictions, depending on how urban agglomeration has occurred over time. An example is Wanzhou Urban District in Chongqing Municipality (a provincial-level entity), which, despite its designation as an urban district, is geographically separated by farmland from Chongqing’s core urban area and functions effectively as a satellite city.
The concept of a "city" in the PRC is further complicated by the existence of alternative urban definitions used in practice. These include delineations based on the dominant urbanized districts of a central city, or boundaries formed by infrastructure (e.g., roads and railways), natural features, or a combination thereof. The National Bureau of Statistics and other governmental bodies often refer to these areas as "urban districts", though this classification can include select counties or towns depending on local administrative arrangements. In some cases, counties or county-level districts, such as Handan County under Handan City (prefecture-level), are considered part of the greater urban area. In this context, districts like Congtai, Hanshan, and Fuxing are typically regarded as the core of urban Handan, with Handan County increasingly integrated as urban expansion progresses.
A particularly complex example is found in the Chaoshan Metropolitan Area, where the urban districts of Jieyang (a prefecture-level city) border those of the central city Shantou (also prefecture-level), creating a contiguous urban region that spans multiple municipalities. Furthermore, nested administrative structures complicate this arrangement: Jieyang, while a prefecture-level city, functions as a satellite of Shantou, and contains within its jurisdiction Puning, a county-level city that itself may act as a satellite of Shantou.
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