[kens]

Setting aside small towns, I find it a bit alarming how many huge cities I know nothing about, places like Tianjin, Dhaka, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Yangon. (Of course if everyone but me is familiar with these cities, I'm sure you'll let me know...) My theory is that the "culturally important" cities that everyone knows (Moscow, Cairo, London, etc.) lags by decades behind the actual growth of cities. Of course, renaming places like Rangoon to Yangon also doesn't help.

Take a look at the list of big cities and see how many you know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...

[_nedR]

What jumped at me was the fact that list seems significantly inaccurate/unrepresentative. For example, Delhi which has a population of 11 million according to its wikipedia article is missing entirely from the list (It would be between 10 and 14 rank as it stands now). The article is controversial due to conflicts in the definition of the boundaries of a city, but by any definition, Delhi should definitely be up there.

[seanmcdirmid]

Being in Asia, I'm more familiar with those cities than the ones to the west. The renaming often just corrects bad names picked by Europeans (e.g. Tienstin vs. Tianjin, though everyone still uses Bangalore when I was there last).