The city proper has a population of 1,301,394 inhabitants as of April 2009. Since the population peak of 1971, the city proper has lost almost one third of its population, mostly due to suburban sprawl subsequent to the deindustrialization process of the last three decades. The urban area of Milan, largely coinciding with its administrative province, is the fifth largest in the E.U. with an estimated population of 4.3 million. The growth of many suburbs and satellite settlements around the city proper since the great economic boom of the 1950-60s have defined the extent and pattern of the metropolitan area, and commuting flows suggest that socioeconomic linkages have expanded well beyond the boundaries of the city and its province, creating a metropolitan area of 7.4 million population expanded all over the central section of Lombardy region.It has been suggested that the Milan metropolitan area is part of the so-called Blue Banana, the area of Europe with the highest population and industrial density.

Migration and immigration

Since the end of World War II, Milan has been host to two waves of mass migration: the first, workers from within Italy; the second, immigrants from outside the peninsula. These two migrations have corresponded with two different economic phases. The first migration coincided with the economic miracle of 1950s and 1960s, a period of extraordinary growth based on classic industry and public works. The second immigration has taken place against the background of a vastly different economy, centered around services, small industry and post-industrial scenarios. The first concerned Italians, from the countryside, the mountains and the cities and towns of the South, the East or the other provinces of Lombardy. The second concerns non-Italians from a myriad of countries, but above all from North Africa, Sub-saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. By the end of the 1990s Milan had a 10 per cent foreign immigrant population, the vast majority of whom worked in the low-level service sector (restaurant workers, cleaners, maids, domestic workers) or in factories.As of January 2009, the Italian national institute of statistics ISTAT estimated that 181,393 foreign-born immigrants lived in Milan, representing 14% of the total population.

Milan has a significant Chinese community, centred around via Paolo Sarpi, often called Milan Chinatown. The Chinese community became established in the 1940s and is the oldest and largest Chinatown in Italy