Metro and city population, and how big a city feels (home, restaurants)

[Katiana]

^^^Yes, there are a lot of ways to break it down. Denver-Aurora; Denver-Boulder; Boulder-Longmont; I've seen them all. Some of these UA pops seem more realistic than the MSA numbers I"ve seen, specifically for Colorado Springs and Omaha.

[CHIP72]

Originally Posted by missionhome

Interesting to see that Los Angeles, despite the cities reputation, is the least sprawling of all metro areas. Even New York and San Francisco had lower densities when you look at the entire metro area. Hence all our traffic problems in So Cal, a dense population that has few options for public transportation and crams the freeways with cars.

The point above illustrates the misconception some anti-"smart growth"/pro "market force development" (aka sprawl) people have about metro areas; they cite the same data and say Los Angeles is doing the "right" kind of development but still has all sorts of problems with congestion (which is often then used as an argument against "smart growth" and by extension, public transit). The problems with the argument are A) Los Angeles and some of other cities literally could not expand further due to physical barriers (the Pacific Ocean and nearby mountains surround most of the Los Angeles Basin), which restricts where development can occur and artificially boosts their density relative to other areas with fewer constraints, B) land values in the Los Angeles area force most people to build on small lots because larger lots are prohibitively expensive (and hard to find due to A), and C) macro level density over an entire metro area doesn't give you a good idea about how truly dense parts of the metro area really are. Land development density that supports other transportation modes besides the private automobile needs not only a high number of people per square mile; it also needs to be mixed use (i.e. residential and retail commercial development within walking distance of one another) and needs to have a well interconnected street network. There are many cities that have much larger amounts of development that meet these criteria than Los Angeles does.

[Spade]

I just think it's very inaccurate to judge a city's size by people living in imaginary city boundaries. States around the US has different ways of determining a city's boundaries. For example, Houston has 2.1 million in 580 sq miles and thus that makes Houston the 4th largest in the nation. But what if every city has that many sq miles. Houston would than NOT be the 4th largest city. New York's population would push pass 10 million and Chicago would be pushing 4 million and so on and so on. Also, cities usually outgrow their boundaries.

Let's throw out some example of city populations.
San Antonio is bigger than Dallas.
Jacksonville is bigger than Miami.
Memphis is bigger than Atlanta.
Austin is bigger than Boston.
Phoenix is bigger than San Francisco.

Anybody that's visited the cities on the 2nd list would tell you that they are bigger than the city they are supposedly smaller than because of the "feel." San Antonio may have a larger population than Dallas. But San Antonio does not even remotely feel larger Dallas. Jacksonville is not even close to being the same size as Miami. Heck Jacksonville is not even the 2nd largest or 3rd largest metro area in it's state. Yet it is the "largest" city in Florida. That's my opinion though.

[f1000]

the metro area population is what really counts, and the prominence of the metro area within a certain geographical region, affects how "big it feels"

[brri]

Originally Posted by f1000

the metro area population is what really counts, and the prominence of the metro area within a certain geographical region, affects how "big it feels"

I think Metro area is probably the best indicator for largeness. Too much credence though is given to UA population figures IMO. Some cities have much larger Urban Area populations than others but the city core is in no way larger in feel, importance or look or even central city population. For example, Virginia Beach's UA is considerably larger than Jacksonville's, but VB does not seem, look or feel larger. It may indeed have a more contiguous built up area but the central cities of Norfolk/VB seem smaller.

[theSUBlime]

Both count to some extent. It's about how a city has used land within it's city proper and what draws (ie, cutlural amenaties and jobs) it has (especially) over its subordinate metropolitan area.

[OgleCo]

A city's metropolitan population is correlational to the size of the metro in square miles.

If a city has 150K and another has 450K, and both have metro populations of 1.1 million, they will both feel the same size. If the metro is that big, more than likely it's spread out into suburbia.

Now, if there is a 400K city with a metro of 1 million, and a 300K city with a metro of 2 million, the three million metro will feel bigger, because more than likely it is spread out. The city core itself may feel much smaller, but in general, the bigger the metro the bigger the 'feel.'

[ogre]

I grew up in the Boston metro area, then attended college in Ohio, and lived there for a few years after college, in an area where Columbus was the nearest large city. At the time, the populations of Columbus and Boston were similar in the cities proper (500k +), while Boston's metro population was somewhere around three times that of Columbus (somewhat above three million--around the mid three millions--compared to a bit over a million; yes, this was a few years ago).

It's somewhat difficult to compare these cities. It's a bit of an apples/oranges comparison, since central Ohio has grown quickly enough in the last few decades that Columbus has some of the sprawl found in Sun Belt cities. This gives Columbus a different physical character than Boston's compact layout. Still, there is a fairly good-sized dense central core in Columbus. My speculation is that this may reflect the fact that Columbus held steady as a solidly mid-sized city for a long time before its fast growth of recent decades, rather than expanding rapidly from small town to big city, as is the case with many sprawling Sun Belt metros. Perhaps the boundaries of the old mid-sized city approximate the borders of today's inner city area, which is now surrounded by a suburban level of density within expanded city limits.

Because of the size of this inner zone, the number of big buildings, and the density of these buildings, inner Columbus seemed to me to be similar in size to Boston's central city, though different in character (not as much classic architecture in central Columbus, and at the time, a few years before the start of the current trend toward inner-city gentrification, more of the central core of Columbus was run down and seedy).

Apples and oranges again, because Columbus showed some of the diffuse land use patterns of cities that have seen rapid growth recently. The downtown core was mostly skyscrapers, large older office buildings, and big stores. By 7:00PM the stores were closed and most of the office workers had gone home. Downtown would be quiet, with an occasional person or two strolling the sidewalks, while the entertainment venues were scattered throughout the city. This scattered Sun Beltish distribution of amenities contrasted sharply with land use in Boston, where pretty much everything you go to the city for is concentrated in a fairly compact central area surrounding downtown. Still, the number and density of large buildings in the central core of Columbus gave me the sense that it was a similar-sized city to Boston. I did notice that Columbus generally had less vehicular traffic than Boston. Somehow, rather than causing me to perceive Columbus as a smaller city, this led me to have the sense that Columbus was about the same size city as Boston, with easier driving.

Apparently I'm one of the people whose perception is that inner-city density gives a city more of a large feel, even if it's density of buildings more than activity. This is one example of the way that various factors affect these perceptions. Perhaps in a Sun Belt city that had grown so rapidly from very small city to large city that it had skipped the stage of developing a dense older core, and instead had become simply a cluster of skyscrapers surrounded by suburbia, I would feel I was in a smaller city than I perceive either the MA or OH state capitals to be. In any case, this is an example where, for me at least, metro area population made little difference in the perceived size of two cities. In this case, I felt that two cities proper of similar population, but with substantially different metro populations, seemed about the same in size and urbanness.

[uglyblackjohn]

-Orge- I didn't even take into cosideration the nightlife aspect of a city. While L.A. is huge, it's only been recently (not since all those old theaters were in active use) that there have been reasons to be downtown at night. Staples Center, Dorothy Chandler, Disney and other venues have given the city a more urbane and less urban feel. Vegas, while more sprawling, always has something to do less than five minutes away. In Vegas, one could always meet someone from a different city, state or country and have a great conversation and a great time. I never thought about the cosmopolitan aspect of this question. ^^ Good post^^

[CMDallas]

It has to do with the city scape.
It doesn't matter how big the metro is if it has high rises and pedestrians everywhere. It will feel big...
on the same token, if you have and acre in between each building with wild grass growing everywhere, the metro could be 100 million for all that anyone cares it might still feel small...
For example, San Antonio despite how large it is smaller then Las Vegas.
I personally would feel that Las Vegas is bigger, even though it is not.