Urban Density Comparisons (definitions, map, largest, downtown)
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scroll down to boroughs and city quarters and you get a clickable map. Choose the density button. It's a German site, the rest of Europe isn't as well covered. Much of the urban parts of the Netherlands are:
Under neighborhoods of Conurbations. I skimmed some other European countries didn't see neighborhood level densities for many cities, I'd curious if others found more. For all them, the district boundaries include undeveloped land, so it can lead to underestimate of residential densities. German cities tend have a lot of parkland and open space scattered. Densest parts of Amsterdam are just under 50k / sq mile.
Looks like the densest parts of Amsterdam are more 60-70k ppsm actually, with 162,000 people living at densities over 50k ppsm.
I got
Population: 1,702,825
Weighted Density: 21,990 ppsm
Wikipedia has only about 1.1 million for the urban area, so I guess those numbers consider Haarlem and the towns north and south of it (that I included) separate. Excluding those towns, the weighted density would be about 25,700 ppsm.
I suspect Berlin would probably be around 25,000 ppsm at census tract sizes. I went through your link for German cities and added combined blocks into units with census tract like populations (trying to keep the tracts rectangular or triangular shaped, like census tracts) for Berlin's core, and kind of making my way outwards towards the less dense parts of the city.
I got to
Population: 1,372,645
Area: 51.53 sq mi
Net Density: 26,636 ppsm
Weighted Density: 43,321 ppsm
That includes everything inside the Ringbahn (a bit over 1m people) and some areas outside. That includes all of the densest neighbourhoods, whose densest "census tracts" top out at typically 70-90k ppsm, except Neukoln where the densest one is 103,768 ppsm (the 8 blocks touching OkerstraBe street). Neukoln seems to be the densest part of Berlin, followed by midrise neighbourhoods east and north of the city centre. Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf and Schoneberg don't seem to get much above 50k ppsm.
A bit hard to say how the rest of the city would turn out. There's a lot of big forests, and farm land, plus some industrial areas and a lot of the residential looking land is allotment gardens with small, probably often single room cottages (ie not primary residences). It's possible much of the population in the outer city lives in highrises and midrises.
City center is denser than the neighborhood figures suggest, mainly because of so much non-residential buildings
Going through the whole city though, especially the low density parts would take too long. Still, it was interesting to go through the core and pick out some patterns in those areas.
It didn't occur to me that map would actually be useful for anything other than a colorful overview. I thought your link referred to the more recent one I posted.
Quote:
Originally Posted by memph
I suspect Berlin would probably be around 25,000 ppsm at census tract sizes. I went through your link for German cities and added combined blocks into units with census tract like populations (trying to keep the tracts rectangular or triangular shaped, like census tracts) for Berlin's core, and kind of making my way outwards towards the less dense parts of the city.
I got to
Population: 1,372,645
Area: 51.53 sq mi
Net Density: 26,636 ppsm
Weighted Density: 43,321 ppsm
That includes everything inside the Ringbahn (a bit over 1m people) and some areas outside. That includes all of the densest neighbourhoods, whose densest "census tracts" top out at typically 70-90k ppsm, except Neukoln where the densest one is 103,768 ppsm (the 8 blocks touching OkerstraBe street). Neukoln seems to be the densest part of Berlin, followed by midrise neighbourhoods east and north of the city centre. Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf and Schoneberg don't seem to get much above 50k ppsm.
Hmm. it sounds like Inner Berlin is quite a bit denser than London, though the net density isn't that different. Perhaps Berlin is the densest city in Northern Europe (excluding France and other former Communist countries), with Amsterdam among the densest for its size?
The densest European cities (pop 1m+) are Barcelona followed by Madrid, Valencia, Athens and Paris.
New York City would still rank near the top, probably somewhere a bit after Paris.
The next densest American/Canadian cities would be about comparable to the least dense European cities, mostly smaller cities in northern Europe (UK, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Germany).
Australian cities are not especially dense, denser than the Southeast and many Midwestern and Great Lakes cities but no denser than Northeastern, Western/SW and South Florida. I'm pretty sure they're less "spiky" than NE cities too, but still have decently vibrant downtowns and transit use.
Neat link, though they used a square km grid and count water in the grid. As well as parks. It would reduce the density of cities with a lot of water or undeveloped land mixed in nearby residential neighborhoods compared to ones more separated. Might do a calculation for American cities to see how much it reduces density vs census tracts
Yeah Porto has a lot of suburban areas that would feel pretty dense on the ground but they're separated from each other by small vineyards and such, so that's probably a big part of the reason why it has a relatively low weighted density by this measure.
I see a huge problem with this, as the land areas used for the calculations are so different.
For example in Barcelona, which is of course very dense, the calculation includes some urban spots and not a continuous land areas:
Meanwhile for Helsinki, it's a continuous land area consisting of 7
independent muncipalities. As you can see there is a lot of almost uninhabited land, including a national park:
Then for Vienna, the urban area has been set combining cities of three different countries!
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