Milwaukee is the largest city in the state of Wisconsin and the fifth-largest city in the Midwestern United States. The seat of the eponymous county, it is on Lake Michigan's western shore. Ranked by its estimated 2018 population, Milwaukee was the 31st largest city in the United States. The city's estimated population in 2018 was 594,511. Milwaukee is the main cultural and economic center of the Milwaukee metropolitan area which had a population of 2,043,904 in the 2014 census estimate. It is the fourth -most densely populated metropolitan area in The Midwest, surpassed only by Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Detroit, respectively. Milwaukee is considered a Gamma global city as categorized by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network with a regional GDP of over $105 billion.