Metropolitan area
From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.
Looking from the air to a city, the city will often appear as one big blob in the landscape. However, very often the limits of the city are not the limit of the blob, where on one side there is city, on the other there is countryside. The limits often run through the built up area. The beginning of a street may be in the city, the end of it may not.
What is called agglomeration (or metropolitan area) is the city, plus all cities and villages it grew together with. The biggest such metropolitan area is that of Tokyo. 8.5 million people live in Tokyo itself, 36.5 million live in the metropolitan area.
So to put it simple, looking from the air again, the blob is the metropolitan area. The city very often is in the center of the blob, but may not be.
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