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Many of these North American focused threads seem to conveniently leave out Mexico. For North America, the answer is Mexico City. Flying into there at night blows NYC, LA, Chicago, and any Canadian city out of the water at just the sheer scale of lighted urbanity.
How? Metro Houston/DFW alone are much larger than Metro Mexico City in area. Mexico City doesn’t come close to Chicago, LA or NYC in scale.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mezter
How? Metro Houston/DFW alone are much larger than Metro Mexico City in area. Mexico City doesn’t come close to Chicago, LA or NYC in scale.
You guys are kidding right?
Mexico City is THE foremost mega-city on the North American continent, lets get that out of the way now. Only NYC and LA belong in the discussion with it, so I'll give you the comparison of those two. But Chicago in no way feels remotely close to the size of Mexico City which has 7 million more people in the city proper, and I have no idea why you would put Houston or Dallas in the same sentence as D.F.. Americans love to look at low density suburban SFH sprawl and call that being a "large city", and it's so unimpressive in comparison to other urban global cities.
There is no USA or Canada city with this scale other than LA or NYC, but this is more dense than LA due to having more high rise/ mid-rise structures all over, and few SFH housing lots sprinkled in the street grid unlike Los Angeles. And this is only the view out of the left hand side of the plane:
Mexico City is THE foremost mega-city on the North American continent, lets get that out of the way now. Only NYC and LA belong in the discussion with it, so I'll give you the comparison of those two. But Chicago in no way feels remotely close to the size of Mexico City which has 7 million more people in the city proper, and I have no idea why you would put Houston or Dallas in the same sentence as D.F.. Americans love to look at low density suburban SFH sprawl and call that being a "large city", and it's so unimpressive in comparison to other urban global cities.
There is no USA or Canada city with this scale other than LA or NYC, but this is more dense than LA due to having more high rise/ mid-rise structures all over, and few SFH housing lots sprinkled in the street grid unlike Los Angeles. And this is only the view out of the left hand side of the plane:
Mexico City is THE foremost mega-city on the North American continent, lets get that out of the way now. Only NYC and LA belong in the discussion with it, so I'll give you the comparison of those two. But Chicago in no way feels remotely close to the size of Mexico City which has 7 million more people in the city proper, and I have no idea why you would put Houston or Dallas in the same sentence as D.F.. Americans love to look at low density suburban SFH sprawl and call that being a "large city", and it's so unimpressive in comparison to other urban global cities.
There is no USA or Canada city with this scale other than LA or NYC, but this is more dense than LA due to having more high rise/ mid-rise structures all over, and few SFH housing lots sprinkled in the street grid unlike Los Angeles. And this is only the view out of the left hand side of the plane:
I’m not disagreeing though. Perhaps there’s a misunderstanding because we’re talking about two completely different things. I was just saying the area of these metros as a whole are more expansive, which is a fact. Not necessarily that any of these places have a more impressive built environment (With the exception of NYC) than Mexico City.
I’m just going assume you haven’t been to NYC, Chicago or LA let alone any Asian mega city lol.
Houston is big but on the grand scale of things, it’s a drop in the bucket
Asian mega-cities aren't that big. Houston is definitely smaller than the aforementioned 3 though, and definitely Tokyo and some of the other cities north of 20,000,000 people. But even a place like Manila isn't that much physically bigger than Austin. Now the multiple high-rise districts, and high density will give it a feeling that it's much larger, not to mention lower speed limits. But from a purely physical perspective, it isn't.
Houston area is similar in scope to Paris or London, just much less people, in the actual neighborhoods.
Mexico City is enormous, what the hell are you taking about.
Mexico City, is physically smaller than Greater Houston. It's about the same size as Minneapolis-Saint Paul, slightly bigger. People really forget how gigantic American cities, are.
Of course built-environment, and traffic+, smaller streets/block sizes and lower posted speed limits contribute to the feeling of a bigger city.
Texas City to Houston is the same distance as Toluca to Mexico City. Texas City has been considered a Houston/Galveston burb for 40 years, and Toluca to this day is not considered, an exurban community of Mexico City, and it's considered it's own separate city.
One of the most shocking things, in my life was driving to Ibadan, early morning, on the one day their was no traffic in Lagos, and realizing after 30-40 minutes you've left the city. This is going from Victoria Island at the bottom of the city all the way north to you've left the city. A city of 20-30 million people. Now it's urbanizing so fast that this drive is already verging on an hour before you've left the city, but you get the point. Low speed limits, traffic and small block sizes all give the illusion combined with the built environment that foreign cities with millions more people are also significantly larger than American cities, but unless, you can drive, at an American speed limit, with no traffic, on a highway you'll never realize how physically small many of these places are.
Last edited by NigerianNightmare; 10-29-2021 at 01:45 AM..
Mexico City, is physically smaller than Greater Houston. It's about the same size as Minneapolis-Saint Paul, slightly bigger. People really forget how gigantic American cities, are.
Well all Im saying is just that Mexico City's dense urban sprawl appears to go on forever and ever from the air.
That said, you are 100% Correct, the physical expanse and extent of development in US Metros is massive compared to the rest of the world.
Spotila@SSP made the awesome maps back in 2011. He went over satellite maps of every major region in the US and around the world, and came up with colored maps of development regardless of population density and here is a collage of his results I found online.
To Scale Urban Maps side by side, 2011:
From the top left...Houston-Philly-London(DONT LOOK AT LONDON)-Bay Area
Atlanta-DC/Baltmore-DFW
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