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IMO it’s
1) Manhattan/Bronx
2) Brooklyn
3) Queens
4) Chicago
5) SF
6) Boston (minus W. rox/Hyde park +Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea)
7) Philly
9) DC
10) NNJ
A simple density calculation like the map above still reflects much better the actual reality on the ground than the awful data manipulation going on in this entire thread.
Pop density comparisons are pretty meaningless when comparing cities of radically different sizes. An average doesn't really tell us how dense the core is.
Everett MA is denser than Philadelphia or Chicago. But, being in the core of Philly or Chicago is clearly a far more urban experience.
Imo, Pop density figures have 3 limitations:
1) it doesn't tell us anything about the scale of density
2) it doesn't say how evenly spread or clustered the density is. A city with density clustered around a core will feel more urban than a city will fairly even or disconnected pockets of density.
3) it only focused on residential activity. In practice city vibrancy is also a function of workers and visitors
I keep hearing the word disjointedness about LA. How and why when describing LA within these boundaries? It's pretty dense. You could walk, Uber, catch a bus, ride the subway or lightlrail within this area. It has highrises, midrises, lowrise apts. Within the 50 square miles are the different nodes seperated by forest, lakes? Is it a long distance between the nodes or neighborhoods? Not at all. 960,000 within these boundaries is alot of people. I live within these boundaries and after living in different cities I don't find myself driving anymore than other cities I've lived in. So I think this car centric thing within the 50 square miles is not so LA, at least within these 50 square miles.
It is dense, but to me it's disjointed in two ways. You can see in a satellite view disjointedness is how its development has larger tracts of lower-density detached SFH blocks scattered throughout in the central 50 square miles and an especially large one with Hancock Park which is sizable and neighboring much more mixed-use and urban neighborhoods/corridors. The other way it's disjointed is the still fairly sizable amount of car-oriented / suburban-ish developments scattered in parts like surface parking lots, drive-through fast food places, grocery stores or other such with large parking lots, etc. that break up the urban fabric which while far fewer in numbers than before, still show up quite a bit. These could be traversed pretty easily if there were a lot of fast ways to do so, but traffic is at a snarl a lot of times for buses and cars and meanwhile that Purple Line subway extension and second phase of the Crenshaw line aren't up yet.
That being said it's still very urban despite such and part of that is the sheer density of people and the many. developments that have taken place that have often replaced surface parking lots and the like which is why I think it has a pretty solid argument over a 50 square mile contiguous are for being above some cities that are more traditionally thought of as urban.
Anyhow, I'm curious as to what 50 square mile boundary you'd draw for LA (and including some reasonable amount of greenspace).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Boston Shudra
Interesting. Wish we knew more about the data and how it was compiled.
Using that graph, Boston does pass Philly at around 125k people. I’m not sure where the line falls exactly, but 50 square miles is pretty small on the scale of UA/MSA/CSA.
Right, so something like a 5 or 10 square mile area would possibly favor Boston. At 50 square miles, then you're probably talking about where it's between 500k to about a million people for the cities in nephi's graph
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 10-09-2020 at 09:25 AM..
A simple density calculation like the map above still reflects much better the actual reality on the ground than the awful data manipulation going on in this entire thread.
Imagine a donut without a hole, now you take out the hole (i.e., now you have a body of water), does the remaining donut change in consistency or quality because of the hole? This whole contiguous density thing is utter nonsense. By the logic of Boston Shudra (using 4 mi radius including water) and others on the thread, somehow a point in the donut without the hole must be a more urban experience than a point in a donut with the hole. It's nonsense.
Using arbitrary boundaries of jurisdictions that range from 36m2 to 500m2+ sounds more ridiculous than Boston Shudra's tool, especially if the tool had been used more uniformly.
Also, the tool was calculating total population, not density. What's the point of comparing the total population of 50m2 area of Houston to a 20m2 area of Seattle? The thread specifically asked for 50m2.
IMO it’s
1) Manhattan/Bronx
2) Brooklyn
3) Queens
4) Chicago
5) SF
6) Boston (minus W. rox/Hyde park +Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea)
7) Philly
9) DC
10) NNJ
If you're going to allow for different parts of the metropolitan area to be represented multiple times for every 50 square mile chunk, then the Tri-State Area would probably show up in five, maybe slots on the list with:
- Manhattan / part of the Bronx
- most of Brooklyn
- Western / Central Queens
- a good chunk of the rest of Queens and a bit of Brooklyn
- urban parts of Hudson and Bergen County in northern New Jersey
- another part of the Bronx / a bit of urban Westchester County
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 10-09-2020 at 09:00 AM..
Pop density comparisons are pretty meaningless when comparing cities of radically different sizes. An average doesn't really tell us how dense the core is.
Everett MA is denser than Philadelphia or Chicago. But, being in the core of Philly or Chicago is clearly a far more urban experience.
Well Everett isn't the core of Boston and most of Philly and Chicago isn't the core.. I don't think this is a great experience.
Some of you are omitting everything except housing.
Does an office tower or school count for nothing?
Probably counts for a lot, but housing is pretty important since it also co-locates a lot of other businesses and services near it especially if it's at a certain density where it's enough of a population base to support a large number of such. Also, pretty much all of the places mentioned have massive employment centers within the most urban 50 square contiguous miles and they scale pretty well with the rankings a lot of people have written for the most part.
Sure, but job concentration, colleges, and other factors will vary a lot in those 50 square mile areas.
They do, but I think it's done a decent though imperfect job of correlating with population density so far with the larger outlier arguably being Los Angeles.
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