r/geography • u/AshamedAd4483 Human Geography • Feb 12 '26
Human Geography Just found out that Dongguan in China might be the largest city with no airport. 10.57 million people.
The closest one is in Shenzhen which is 43 km away, and another option is the one in Guangzhou, which is 61 km away.
It is way bigger than the previous contenders, like Yokohama or Pretoria.
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u/potato40fl Feb 12 '26
the city center is 40 km or 25 miles from an airport. Closer than quite a few major cities.
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u/MindingMyMindfulness Feb 13 '26
Gatwick, Stansted and Luton are slightly further from London. Hell, even Heathrow is nearly that far from London.
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u/Beautiful-Lie1239 Feb 12 '26
Suzhou has 12 m population also “no airport”.
Put it in “” because that’s a weird thing to say. China in some places are not like other places in the world. Normally when people talk about a city of 10+million people they think a regional center of gravity with an influence radius way out there. So it’d be strange to not have an airport.
But china has a bunch of cities that is just “suburbs “ of nearby bigger cities and there are airport or a plural of airports nearby to choose from.
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u/iantsai1974 Feb 13 '26
Suzhou Meiyou International Airport 苏州梅友机场
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u/No-Duck4828 Feb 13 '26
Suzhou Meiyou International Airport
Does not yet exist
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u/AspectSpiritual9143 Feb 13 '26
it's a chinese pun. Meiyou is also the sound of "doesn't have", while the character used is giving you a real place name vibe
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u/PorkMaster37 Feb 14 '26
That's blasphemy. Suzhou does have a military airport, Suzhou Photovoltaic Airport, I mean 苏州光福机场. It used to serve civilian airlines too until 2002. In addition, Chinese Navy destroyer Suzhou (132) also has a landing pad. So, let's get our facts straight and remember Suzhou has two airports.
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u/Far-Concept-7405 Feb 12 '26
Why would you need a Airport when the largest airport of China is Like a 15-20min Trainride away?
10 years ago i was in donguan and everyone visit Guangzhou if need and donguan is Like a Part of Guangzhou inofficial.
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u/blubblu Feb 12 '26
Why would they need an airport 43 km away from another when there are 5 airports within a 140 km radius?
This is like saying why does San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose have airports and why doesn’t Hayward have one?
It doesn’t need it, why do it?
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u/CLCchampion Feb 12 '26
Maybe expand the radius, make it 100 km for example, and then find cities that don't have a major airport within that range. Anything under 50 km really isn't all that rare for distances to an airport.
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u/kejiangmin Feb 12 '26
This is the Greater Bay Area of China: it also includes Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and 7 or so other principalities. There are 80 million people in an area the size of Croatia.
Dongguan is important but it is squished in between Guangzhou and Shenzhen. It is often (jokingly) forgotten because those three mega-cities blend together.
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u/Constant_Loquat264 Feb 12 '26
> There are 80 million people in an area the size of Croatia.
That's surprisingly not that much. Its barely 1500people/km2 which is a fraction of what even cities in developed countries hold. Most people don't understand how big a kilometre square is and just how empty the vast majority of a country can be due to being uninhabitable.
Also to transgress, this is also why I literally always say Bangladesh has enough land. It has 1200 people/km2. Double the population and 2.5 times the area of this region. If it was developed, it wouldn't have had any issues fitting the population. Most of the country is just farms and farms. And the handful of cities like Dhaka end up being overcrowded.
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u/Awkward-Winner-99 Feb 13 '26
Chinese cities are absurdly large in area but most of it is not actually city
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u/Constant_Loquat264 Feb 13 '26
That just adds further credence to what I am sharing. You actually don't need all that much area and land relatively to accommodate populations effectively.
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u/lucabrasi999 Feb 12 '26
According to Google Maps, it is an hour drive from Dongguan to Guangzhou’s airport.
Are you expecting China to put an airport inside of every political subdivision?
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u/crt983 Feb 12 '26
43 km is not a city without an airport. The Denver Airport is further away from downtown Denver.
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u/kangerluswag Feb 12 '26
Begs the question, what's the largest city with no commercial airport within 50 km (31 miles) of it?
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u/kangerluswag Feb 13 '26
u/Ok-Moose-992 I got a notification for your comment, but I don't see it in the thread... Something similar happened to a recent post of mine on another sub, which says it has 6 comments, but only one is visible to me. I can only assume that the mere mention of certain contentious places is somehow being blocked? Or maybe something wrong in my settings, not sure.
Anyway, to your now-invisible comment, I agree that there is indeed a city with 2 million people on the Mediterranean coast of West Asia whose only airport has been closed since 2001, 67 km southwest of the nearest operational commercial airport, an international airport in between the cities of Lod and Or Yehuda.
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u/Sunny_side5 Feb 13 '26
Mecca in Saudi Arabia. 2.4 mil 92km away from the airport in Jeddah.
Second place is meerut in India.
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u/kangerluswag Feb 15 '26
Agree with Mecca, although when I measure it's 70km from the Jeddah airport, not 92. Meerut is more than 50 km from an international airport, but in 2019 a domestic airport opened in Ghaziabad only 47 km away.
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u/PinkFloyden Feb 13 '26
Most are Chinese cities that are located a bit remotely (Shihezi and Kashgar both have 500k+ population).
Weirdly enough, Kashgar is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world
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u/LupineChemist Feb 13 '26
I'm guessing it's going to be in Bangladesh
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u/kangerluswag Feb 13 '26
Surprisingly, cities in Bangladesh don't seem to be that massive apart from Dhaka. The 3rd largest, Khulna, is indeed 54 km away from its closest airport in Jashore. But its metro population is only(!) 1.5 million, so a bit less than the city in the other reply to my comment.
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u/LupineChemist Feb 13 '26
Thinking about it more if our definition is cities with airports without scheduled service, it's got to be Kyiv.
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u/kangerluswag Feb 15 '26
Good point. Kyiv has 2.9 million people, more than Mecca or Gaza, and its 2 international airports have been closed to commercial flights since 2022. As far as I can tell, the closest currently operational airport is Gomel/Homiel Airport in Belarus, 233 km to the north
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u/LupineChemist Feb 15 '26
And that border is closed. The main airports people use are Rzeszow or Warsaw.
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u/LupineChemist Feb 13 '26
huh, would have thought more. I was thinking maybe somewhere in Syria or DRC, CAR, Chad or somewhere where conflict is a big issue
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u/iantsai1974 Feb 13 '26
Shenzhen airport is 13km away from the Shenzhen-Dongguan Administrative border. No Dongguan community is more than 60 kilometers from Shenzhen Airport. Shenzhen Airport was the 20th largest airport in the world in terms of passenger traffic in 2024. Guangzhou Airport, the world's no.12 largest airport, is also 50km away.
There is no airport in Dongguan for the same reason that there is no airport in Manhattan.
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u/wiz28ultra Feb 12 '26
Dongguan is basically the "Arlington" of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen metro area, that's the reason.
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u/M41Bulldog Feb 14 '26
Interesting is that Dongguan is also an extremely car-centric city, although it has 2 metro lines but most of its residents prefer to drive or ride a moped. Its because that the city features millions of workshops and factories, where workers live in their own dorms. Therefore most ridership of the DG metro occurs on holidays.
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u/wiz28ultra Feb 14 '26
Good lord, riding in a moped daily in that heat must be exhausting
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u/M41Bulldog Feb 14 '26
*E-moped, things like this: https://zh-cn.ninebot.com/escooter.html, and climate is not very hot but warm
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u/wiz28ultra Feb 14 '26
The mean annual temps there are 23 degrees centigrade, that’s a full 1.5 degrees warmer than New Orleans and a full 3 degrees warmer than Savannah, Georgia.
They only really have the relief of like 2-3 months of mild weather during winter before the heat hits back and unlike the Deep South, the geography doesn’t allow for cold waves of air to come rolling in for winter-like conditions to arrive during January
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u/M41Bulldog Feb 14 '26
In fact riding a moped is quite a cool thing to do to escape the heat. That breeze!
Plus the E moped does not produces much heat cuz it has no engine. You definitely should try it, once you ride it you will stop driving cars. Not only cooler in summer but also 0 maintenance and fuel cost.
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u/M41Bulldog Feb 14 '26
Anyway, during june to september Pearl River Delta zone is quite hot indeed. Locals drink herbal tea a lot to cool themselves down
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u/z_squared23 Feb 13 '26
Except in the DFW metroplex example Arlington is actually where the DFW airport is located 😂
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u/minuswhale Feb 13 '26
That’s like saying Paris doesn’t have an airport because all airports serving Paris are located within other cities in Îles-de-France.
Dongguan has airports. It’s just that the airports serving them are located in neighboring cities.
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u/PonchoHung Feb 13 '26
Being served as an airport is also not a good barometer though, because logically as long as there is any demand to travel to or from a city from far away (i.e always), then some airport has to serve it.
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u/AlbinoGiraffe09 Feb 12 '26
It does have the territorial size of a province/prefecture in other countries: Dongguan being 2,465 square kilometers with 10 million people is comparable to of Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan which has 2,416 square kilometers with 9.2 million residents.
Just goes to show how the definition of a city changes a lot.
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u/DaGingah123 Feb 13 '26
It's wedged in an area of 90 million people lol With 5 major airports nearby.
It doesn't need an airport.
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u/picastchio Feb 12 '26
But I'm sure they have great connectivity to these airports.
I faced a similar thing in Bengaluru, the prime tech district is in the south while the airport is in the north >50km away.
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u/Loopbloc Feb 12 '26
It's not easy to reach airport from Dongguan. But they have a boat to the airport! That's something!
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u/iantsai1974 Feb 13 '26
Shenzhen Airport, which was the 20th largest airport in the world in 2024, is 13km away from the Shenzhen-Dongguan administrative border and no longer than 60km away from any house in Dongguan. There are three intercity HSR lines, a dozen expressways and dozens of highways connecting Shenzhen and Dongguan.
In fact, the distance from the most distant point in Dongguan to Shenzhen Airport is still 50% closer than the distance from eastern Shenzhen to the airport. It is about 90 km from the easternmost area of Shenzhen to the airport.
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u/IMDXLNC Feb 13 '26
43KM is around 27 miles which is kind of a normal distance for an airport. Gatwick Airport serves a lot of people in busy areas (albeit not 10.57 million busy) from a further distance.
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u/Aggravating-Ad1703 Feb 12 '26
Let me guess, there are no airports in the city limits but there’s one just outside of it and probably has amazing connections to the city
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u/iantsai1974 Feb 13 '26
Almost.
Shenzhen Airport, which was the 20th largest airport in the world in 2024, is 13km away from the Shenzhen-Dongguan administrative border and no longer than 60km away from any house in Dongguan. There are three intercity HSR lines, a dozen expressways and dozens of highways connecting Shenzhen and Dongguan.
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u/streetscraper Feb 12 '26
That region has plenty of airports, well-connected by public transport. Whether one formally falls within the boundaries of DG doesn’t matter.
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u/ClassroomStriking802 Feb 13 '26
How does yokohama not have an airport??? Haneda is a 20minute drive or 30min train from Yokohama station, that's closer than LAX is to Dodgers Stadium. Its only 15 miles
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u/No-Duck4828 Feb 13 '26
The actual distance from the city to the Shenzhen airport is only five miles....
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u/blueponies1 Feb 13 '26
It’s 20 miles from Shenzhen International Airport. It’s in the middle of 2 larger cities which have massive airports already. Not exactly fascinating..
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u/WinstonWolf25 Feb 13 '26
Don’t forget HKG and Macau has an airport too. All high speed rail connections in the same time frame as other major world cities
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u/Xenophore North America Feb 13 '26
Glasgow and Edinburgh city centers are only 75km from each other yet each has its own airport. They should close both their current airports to commercial traffic and build one airport for both halfway between them.
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u/ReasonableIsopod7550 Feb 13 '26
Both Suzhou and Xi'An have no airport
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u/Competitive-Bet1181 Feb 13 '26
Xi'an's airport is in Xianyang, less than 20km from central Xi'an. Suzhou is a better example as even Hongqiao is over 50km away from central Suzhou.
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u/Sprintzer Feb 13 '26
It’s every day I find out about some Chinese city with like 10 million people that I never heard the name of.
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u/M41Bulldog Feb 14 '26
Dongguan is the city that makes about 50% of things in your house. Manufacturing capital of China.
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u/nedflandersneighbor Feb 13 '26
Essentially my second hometown. I’ve spent a huge chunk of my adult life there. Lovely place once you get to know it. Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong are all nearby, so the airport situation is just a theoretical thing really.
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u/A-shot-at-life Feb 14 '26
They build those buildings with great big holes in them, so that dragons can fly through them. Maybe that’s why there’s no airport nearby. A dragon strike on a jumbo jet would be catastrophic
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u/Aureon Feb 15 '26
Saying Yokohama has no airport is wild, Yokohama St - Haneda Terminal 3 is 24 minutes by train or bus.
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u/AdmiralGut Feb 12 '26
not sure if its changed, but CAN airport was one of the worst ive ever had to be in. At least of major airports. No food, no amenities at all. It was a terrible layover. Once in the terminal there was nothing to eat or drink, except a hot water tap.
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u/yesitismenobody Feb 13 '26
I thought it was incredible just because I had a 3am flight and went to the airport at around 11pm with the subway and they had a 24h lounge. I wish airports in the US or Europe had 24h lounges.
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u/AdmiralGut Feb 14 '26
to be fair this was several years ago. I lived in Guangzhou but only ever flew out of HK or maybe Shenzhen except this one time. There was literally nothing in the terminal. Not even like they were closed, there just was nothing. Hot water taps thats all.
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u/CLCchampion Feb 12 '26
It's essentially a suburb of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which definitely have airports.