Random City Generator
Draw a major world city at random — for trip ideas, story settings and geography games.
Sometimes the hardest part of planning anything is choosing where. This generator draws one major world city at random from a curated list of more than 120 — Tokyo, Cairo, São Paulo, Reykjavik-scale capitals and sprawling megacities alike — and shows it with its country, its region and an approximate metropolitan population. Set the region menu if you want the draw kept to one part of the world, or leave it open and let the whole list compete.
Draw one major world city at random — a place to daydream about, set a story in, or settle on for your next trip shortlist. Filter by region if you already have half a plan.
City populations here are metropolitan-area figures, rounded approximations — city-proper counts would be far smaller for most places on this list. Before you fall for a city, check its Weather and its local time on the World Clock. Drawing at country level instead? That is the Random Country Generator.
Quick answers
How many cities are in the generator?
More than 120 major world cities, spread across all six regions — Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Oceania. You can draw from the full list or filter to a single region.
The list is deliberately curated rather than exhaustive. It covers the megacities everyone should occasionally land on — places like Delhi, Jakarta, Lagos and Mexico City — alongside smaller regional capitals such as Wellington, Montevideo and Suva, so a draw can surprise you without landing somewhere obscure for its own sake.
Why is the population labelled metropolitan area?
Because city-proper populations depend on where each country happens to draw its municipal boundary, which makes them misleading to compare. Metropolitan-area figures, rounded approximations, describe the continuous built-up city and give a fairer sense of how big a drawn city actually feels.
The gap can be dramatic. Paris is about two million people city-proper but roughly eleven million as a metro area; Sydney’s metro figure covers most of the urban sprawl people mean when they say Sydney. Treat the numbers here as a size class — a few hundred thousand, a few million, tens of millions — not as a league table.
How can I use a random city for travel planning?
Draw a city, then treat it as a research prompt rather than a booking: check its weather, its local time, what it costs to get there and what a few days there would actually look like. If it survives that look, it earns a place on your real shortlist.
Filtering helps at different stages. Early on, draw from All regions and let unfamiliar places in. Later, once you know a trip has to stay within one continent or one budget of flight time, filter the draw to that region and use repeated draws to build a shortlist of three or four candidates to compare properly.
How to use
- Leave the region menu on All regions, or choose a region to keep the draw within one part of the world.
- Press Draw a city.
- Read the card: city, country, region and its approximate metropolitan population.
- Follow the links under the card to check that city’s weather and local time, or press again for a new city.
About this tool
Travel is the obvious use, but rarely the whole story. A drawn city makes a good starting point for a trip shortlist: not “book this tomorrow”, but “why not look into this place properly?”. Writers draw cities for settings they would never have picked on purpose, which is often exactly what a story needs. Geography teachers and quiz players use it the other way round — draw a city, then test who can name its country, its region and roughly how many people live there before the card is revealed to the group.
City size needs one honest warning, because the numbers on the card are metropolitan-area figures, rounded approximations. A city proper and its metro area are very different things: Paris counts about two million people inside the city boundary and around eleven million across its metropolitan area, and both numbers are “correct” under their own definitions. Metro figures are used here because they describe the city people actually experience — the built-up place, not the administrative line — but boundaries are drawn differently in different countries, so the figures compare loosely, never exactly.
Each draw is made with the browser’s cryptographic random source and rejection sampling, so every city in the filtered list is equally likely. Nothing is weighted by fame: a mid-sized city in Oceania has the same chance as New York when the filter is set to All regions, which is rather the point — a generator that mostly returns the five cities you already thought of would not be doing its job. The whole thing runs locally in your browser, and no result is stored or sent anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
Is this every city in the world?
No — and no usable list could be. There are tens of thousands of cities; this generator holds a curated set of more than 120 major ones, chosen so that every draw is a real, substantial place worth a traveller’s, writer’s or quiz player’s attention.
Why does a city’s population here differ from what I have seen elsewhere?
Almost always because of definitions. City proper, urban area and metropolitan area give three different numbers for the same place, and sources also use different estimate years. This page consistently uses rounded metropolitan-area approximations, and says so on the card.
Can I draw a city for a story or a game?
Yes, that is a common use. A randomly drawn setting avoids the handful of default cities everyone reaches for, and the region filter lets you keep the draw inside the part of the world your story or game already inhabits.
Are some cities more likely to come up than others?
No. Within whatever region filter you set, every city is drawn with equal probability using crypto.getRandomValues with rejection sampling. Fame, size and population do not weight the result.
Is my draw saved anywhere?
No. The list and the draw exist only in this page while the tab is open. Nothing is uploaded, stored or shared.
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