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Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
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This includes neighbourhoods within the city limits and surrounding suburban areas. I'm talking areas that feel distinctly city-like as opposed to suburban. Which metro seems to have the most area/greatest percentage being high density? I'm talking rowhouses, very dense cottages on small lots or high rises, mixed use, TOD etc.
It is definitely between Chicago and SF-Oakland. If the question is
based on percentage of the entire urban area, then SF-Oakland easily win since most of the urban area is pretty urban. If the question is based on raw amount of urban area, then Chicago definitely wins. Chicago is gigantic compared to these cities.
^tract sizes for those cities seem to be more or less on the same scale, with many in the 2,000-5,000 pop. range for each city, so it's not too much of an apples-to-oranges comparisons (chicago's tracts are the biggest on average it seems, but it's not a big difference).
and here are urban areas ranked by population density (old data from 2000, but still interesting):
^There were similar lists for CSAs and MSAs i think, but i can't find them right now.
here's central city density for each metro:
San Francisco - 17,243/sq mi
Boston - 12,752/sq mi
Chicago - 11,864.4/sq mi
Philadelphia - 11,457/sq mi
Oakland - 7,298.8/sq mi
San Jose - 5,758.1/sq mi
So pound for pound, i guess the Bay Area is densest of the bunch. For central cities (excluding Oakland and SJ), they're all pretty equal, with SF having the clear edge. SF also has the edge for urban area density. But for sheer size alone Chicago is the clear winner. Chicago is big, and has large swaths of 20,000-50,000 pp/sq. mi. density that extend farther than similar areas in tiny SF.
^nice, they combined the San Jose and San Francisco urban areas together. That list isn't direct from the US census though (it's from demographia.com, which took census data and applied some of their own methodology to it).
But, it seems to be pretty much exactly the same combination the US census is planning to do in 2013 when they update the nation's metro/urban areas (FINALLY, in SF/SJ's case).
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