Atlanta the 6th Largest Metro? Has ATL already surpass DC and Philly ?

[btownboss4]

Originally Posted by the resident09

People gotta travel more. Americans have a pretty false perception of what 5 or 6 million people "feels" like.

I implore anybody to pull up for a week in any major global capital like Accra or Madrid etc. and come back to their cities and think to which "feels" biggest.

Just to push back there was a poll on which felt bigger Atlanta or Boston? And Atlanta won. Despite Boston having way more people in what could be considered “city neighborhoods”. So your priors of what makes a city feel big are not universal

[the resident09]

Originally Posted by btownboss4

Just to push back there was a poll on which felt bigger Atlanta or Boston? And Atlanta won. Despite Boston having way more people in what could be considered “city neighborhoods”. So your priors of what makes a city feel big are not universal

I said that Atlanta feels like a bigger city than Boston? Show me where this was stated by me. We also know C-D polls are one of the last places to look for objectivity regarding comparing cities.

[btownboss4]

Originally Posted by the resident09

I said that Atlanta feels like a bigger city than Boston? Show me where this was stated by me. We also know C-D polls are one of the last places to look for objectivity regarding comparing cities.

Yes big “city feel” isn’t an objective measure.

What you were implying was having a denser urban core makes a place feels bigger. But that’s not how people universally interpret size. Skyscrapers, big highways, endless sprawl does make a place feel big. Most people who visit Atlanta to not just appear on Centennial Olympic Park, walk in a 3 mile circle then leave.

People enter and exit the city. If you fly into Atlanta you fly into a Massive Airport. That makes you feel like you’re arriving in some big important place. Philly doesn’t have that overwhelming airport.,or if you take the AC line to Atlantic City. “Philly” very abruptly ends after like 3 suburbs and you’re in the basically uninhabited Pine Barrens for 25 miles or whatever
There are aspects of Atlanta independent of having 25,000 ppsm neighborhoods that make it feel big

[NigerianNightmare]

Originally Posted by btownboss4

True but what? ~75% of Metro Philly is just as leafy-suburban maybe at best “cute village Village center” kinda development. New York is the only metro area where anywhere close to a majority live in “the city”.

I think there is room for Atlanta to urbanize while still satisfying people who want they McMansion lifestyle, because most American metros you’re arguing about a marginal 10-15% of the metro. Cause at the moment Atlanta is what 92-93% suburban. Bringing that down to 87% would be a total transformation of the city proper of Atlanta.

I agree anyone who argues the urban development from a political perspective doesn’t realize that all U.S cities including NYC are closer to each other in built environment metro wide than they are to non-Anglophone cities. Like Lagos has the density of NYC metro-wide and so does most of the developing world. Suburbs mean fundamentally different things outside of America and a little bit of the Canadian context. Even talking about Canada they’ve implemented rules to the point that the vast majority of their cities given 30 years will be denser than just about any American city not on the West Coast (the same rules also make them extremely expensive).

All this argument about Southerners don’t like denser cities is meaningless when 4 million+ folk moved to super leafy even less-dense than Houston/Dallas suburbs of Boston and Philly which far outnumber the urban residents. Even NYC has tons of suburban sprawl and it’s only the scale of NYC that balances it out so over 50% of people live in a somewhat urban environment. NYC’s growth wasn’t even purposeful but has more to do with the fact that it was already a large city with suburbs in 1900.

[JMT]

This thread has veered way off course. Time to close it.