>>1200464Dresdener detected. It's cheating to list municipal populations for all the other cities and then put in the metropolitan population for Dresden, which seems to have been made up by some random wikipedia user. The number certainly isn't in the source they listed.
Metropolitan areas for Germany are a complete meme. Take for example Hannover-Braunschweig-Göttingen-Wolfsburg (great name btw) or Berlin-Brandenburg. They contain large population centers, but they're still 90% rural areas.
Granted, municipal population stats can be a complete meme as well. Take Salzgitter for example: This so called "city" of over 100 000 is actually two medium-sized towns with a few smaller towns and villages clustered around them.
I personally like to use numbers for cohesive urban areas. For example, Cologne has just over a million inhabitants in the municipal borders, but 10.6 in the metropolitan area. If you add the population of all the municipalities immediately clustered around the city, you get a number of around 1.8 million, which is a pretty good number to get to the "true size" of the city. This number reflects how large, cosmopolitan and important the city feels IMHO.
