Blue Banana

The Blue Banana (also known as the Hot Banana, Bluemerang, European Megalopolis, Manchester–Milan Axis or European Backbone) is a discontinuous corridor of urbanisation in Western Europe, with a population of around 111 million. It stretches approximately from North West England in the north to Northern Italy in the south.

The curvature of this corridor (hence "banana") takes in the cities Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham, London, Lille, Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, Charleroi, Liège, Eindhoven, the Ruhr area, Düsseldorf, Wuppertal, Cologne, Bonn, Frankfurt am Main, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Munich, Innsbruck, Basel, Zurich, Turin, Milan, Venice, and Genoa and covers one of the world's highest concentrations of people, money and industry. The concept was developed in 1989 by RECLUS, a group of French geographers managed by Roger Brunet.

List of cities and regions

The cities in the table below include their greater urban areas, clockwise from the north-west.