Random City Generator

Why the first five look odd

The page opens on a fixed set of five cities, picked because each one breaks an assumption about city data. Press Generate cities and they give way to a random draw.

1. Chongqing, 32.1M. Bigger than Tokyo on this list. The number covers the whole municipality, about 82,000 km² of towns and farmland, close to the area of Austria. The built-up core holds a fraction of those people.
2. Paris, 2.1M. France counts the commune inside the ring road. The wider metro area runs to about 13 million, six times as many.
3. Manila, 1.8M. The capital is one of 16 cities in Metro Manila, and Quezon City next door is bigger.
4. Ottawa, 1.02M. Canada's capital trails Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary.
5. Reykjavík, 140K. The northernmost capital of a sovereign state, at 64.15° N, with an accented í most keyboards lack.

23 capitals outgrown by a city at home

Tick Capitals only and the results skew small, because many countries put the government somewhere other than the biggest city. In this pool, these capitals trail a larger city in the same country:

Countries with two capitals, or none

• Bolivia. Sucre is the constitutional capital. The government sits in La Paz. The generator flags Sucre.
• South Africa. Three capitals split by branch: Pretoria for the executive, Cape Town for parliament, Bloemfontein for the judiciary. The generator flags Pretoria.
• Netherlands. Amsterdam is the capital under the constitution. Parliament, the king's office, and the embassies sit in The Hague.
• Switzerland. The constitution names no capital. Bern calls itself the federal city.
• Indonesia. A law passed in 2022 moves the capital from Jakarta to Nusantara on Borneo. Until the move finishes, Jakarta stays flagged.

Using the cities as test data

Copy CSV and Download CSV both give a header row plus one line per city, in this order:

name,aka,country,iso2,region,lat,lng,population,capital

Copy JSON gives an array of objects with the same nine keys. Population is a plain integer and capital is true or false, so neither needs parsing.

Key on name plus country, never name alone

Hyderabad (IN) / Hyderabad (PK) and San Jose (US) / San José (CR) share a name inside this pool alone. Beyond the pool, Springfield names a city or town in dozens of US states. A lookup table keyed on the city name breaks on the first collision.

Rows worth forcing into a test run

• Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, 25 characters. Checks truncation in cards, dropdowns, and address labels.
• Xi'an and Nuku'alofa, apostrophes inside the name. Catches unescaped SQL and broken CSV quoting.
• São Paulo, Chișinău, and Reykjavík. Non-ASCII letters for encoding, sort order, and search. The aka column holds the plain-ASCII spelling where one is common.
• Hong Kong, San Juan, and Nouméa. Each has its own ISO code (HK, PR, NC) but sits outside any country list built from UN members. A country dropdown that rejects HK will reject these rows.
• Vatican City, population 800, and Valletta, about 6,000. Edge values for a field expecting thousands of residents.

What sits in each region

The pool holds 326 cities from 154 countries and territories. 71 of them lie south of the equator. Regions follow the UN M49 scheme, so Istanbul, Baku, and Tbilisi count as Asia, and Central America with the Caribbean counts as North America.

Filter combinations worth a try

Oceania, capitals only, under 1M 11 cities

Capitals from Canberra down to Funafuti, population about 6,300. A good round for anyone who thinks they know their capitals.

Asia, 10M and up 18 cities

Chinese municipalities take most of the slots, for the reason covered above. Swap to 5M to 10M for a more mixed list.

Europe, capitals only 41 cities

Every European capital in the pool, Vatican City included. Set the count to 10 and read the list aloud as a quiz.