A city on two continents
ISTANBUL stands on both sides of the Bosphorus, a narrow strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, so it is the only great city spread across two continents, Europe and Asia. It has had three names: Byzantium, founded by Greek settlers, Constantinople, after the Roman emperor Constantine made it his capital in 330, and Istanbul. For more than fifteen hundred years it was the capital of an empire, first the Byzantine and then the Ottoman, which is one reason it is packed with palaces, mosques and churches; our places of worship page covers its most famous building.
A city built on water
VENICE is built on more than a hundred small islands in a lagoon, linked by around four hundred bridges, and it has no roads for cars at all. Its buildings stand on millions of wooden piles driven into the mud centuries ago. Starved of air under the water, the wood has not rotted but slowly hardened. The city floods several times a year when high tides meet strong winds, and since 2020 a system of huge gates at the lagoon's entrances has been raised to hold back the worst tides.
Other cities have fought water too. Much of SHANGHAI, one of the biggest cities in the world, is built on soft ground at the mouth of the Yangtze, and the weight of its skyscrapers has made parts of it sink.
Rebuilt after disaster
In 1871 a fire destroyed much of CHICAGO, then a city built largely of wood. Rebuilding gave architects a clear space, and in 1885 Chicago got the Home Insurance Building, often called the first skyscraper, because it used a steel frame to carry its weight instead of thick walls. Tall buildings spread from there.
AUCKLAND, New Zealand's largest city, is built on a field of around fifty small volcanoes, and several of its hills are old volcanic cones, with craters still visible on top. KYOTO, the old imperial capital of Japan, has around 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines. DUBAI grew from a small fishing and pearl-diving town into a city of glass towers in a few decades, after oil was found in the 1960s.
Rivalries and the rest of the grid
Many countries have a pair of cities that have argued for generations: SYDNEY and MELBOURNE in Australia, TORONTO and VANCOUVER in Canada, MILAN and Rome, MUNICH and Berlin. Neither of the Australian pair got to be the capital, as our capitals page explains. MUMBAI, India's biggest city and home of the film industry nicknamed Bollywood, was known as Bombay until 1995.
FLORENCE was the heart of the Renaissance, NAPLES the birthplace of pizza, GENEVA the founding home of the Red Cross in 1863, and MARRAKECH is famous for its huge main square, which fills every evening with food stalls, musicians and storytellers. The biggest urban area of all is Tokyo, with around 37 million people. OSAKA is known in Japan for its food, BOSTON for its universities and HAMBURG for its port, one of the busiest in Europe.