A metropolis is a very large city or urban area which is a significant economic, political and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections and communications. The term is Greek and means the "mother city" of a colony (in the ancient sense), that is, the city which sent out settlers. This was later generalized to a city regarded as a center of a specified activity, or any large, important city in a nation.
Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of the world with upwards of 35 million people and the world's largest urban agglomeration economy with a GDP of US$1.479 trillion at purchasing power parity in 2008. The city hosts 47 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, the highest amount of any city.
Urban areas of fewer than one million people are rarely considered metropolises in contemporary contexts. Big cities belonging to a larger urban agglomeration, but which are not the core of that agglomeration, are not generally considered a metropolis but a part of it. The plural of the word is most commonly metropolises.
Read more about Metropolis: Antiquity, Etymology and Modern Usage, Global Cities, Metropolis As A Mainland Area
Famous quotes containing the word metropolis:
“New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“If Los Angeles has been called “the capital of crackpots” and “the metropolis of isms,” the native Angeleno can not fairly attribute all of the city’s idiosyncrasies to the newcomer—at least not so long as he consults the crystal ball for guidance in his business dealings and his wife goes shopping downtown in beach pajamas.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)