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Cities like San Fran and Boston are extremely dense, but you can see how they're helped with the lack of huge industrial areas, airports that are either not in the city limits or are squeezed to within a few square miles, and don't have large tracts of undeveloped land.
As far as San Francisco goes, I added up the land area of the parks, and got 2.3 square miles for The Presidio, 1.6 square miles for Golden gate Park, 0.5 square miles for McLaren Park, and I figure there are about 1.5 square miles of other parkland within the city, so that's 6.1 square miles total...I then figured there's about 2 square miles of completely unpopulated industrial area in SF as well, so that leaves 38.6 square miles and 808,976 people, which gives a population density of 20,958 people per square mile, rather than 17,323.
^ right. I mean Chicago is 237 square miles and has 12,500 or whatever population density.
You can back 10 square miles for the airports, 10 square miles of the Wolf Lake area on the south side that's undeveloped, huge railroad yards and southside industrial areas and suddenly the average density of developed areas starts changing quickly.
Cities like San Fran and Boston are extremely dense, but you can see how they're helped with the lack of huge industrial areas, airports that are either not in the city limits or are squeezed to within a few square miles, and don't have large tracts of undeveloped land.
Certainly saying those cities aren't dense, but I think that's one of the reasons people focus on urban density or residential density many times over just using the official boundries of cities that might include 50 square miles of farmfields or desert.
I see what you're saying...but look at Boston. We do include our airport (yea I know it's not as big as the Chicago ones), and we've got plenty of industrial areas in the city. Just look South of downtown and North of Charlestown on the Mystic River. Much of that area is undeveloped, industrial or Seaport. We've got one of the highest amount of parkland as a % of city area too (16.3%). Look at the harbor islands. They've got almost zero development on them, but count in our land area. Granted the total area may be relatively small, but it's there.
(That's why if you look at Wikipedia, our total area is 89.63 sq miles, but our land area is only 48.43 sq miles)
We've got plenty of open/undeveloped areas in Boston, which is why you'll see most of our inner neighborhoods are around 20,000-30,000 ppsm...with the North End topping 63,000 ppsm. Even relatively outter neighborhoods like Allston and Brighton have densities of 16,350 ppsm and 16,180 ppsm.
As far as San Francisco goes, I added up the land area of the parks, and got 2.3 square miles for The Presidio, 1.6 square miles for Golden gate Park, 0.5 square miles for McLaren Park, and I figure there are about 1.5 square miles of other parkland within the city, so that's 6.1 square miles total...I then figured there's about 2 square miles of completely unpopulated industrial area in SF as well, so that leaves 38.6 square miles and 808,976 people, which gives a population density of 20,958 people per square mile, rather than 17,323.
This is rather different than comparing the urban footprint. If we further reduced Phoenix' square mileage based on the industrial areas, parkland IN the urban footprint, the airport, etc we'd be talking about Phoenix having 12,000-15,000+ people per square mile. Phoenix has the nation's largest park system and one of the largest single municipal parks in the world. There are also parks in the "inner-city" that overshadow Central Park acreage; Papago Park, and Tres Rios and other huge parks (though smaller) like Steele Park, Hance Park, and Encanto Park...
The difference is that the undeveloped land in Phoenix is designated as such by the will of the people and by law. These areas cannot have any type of development built on them whatsoever. Industrial areas can be converted to residential (warehouse districts for instance) and the airports are hardly unpaved and open land.
2683 people per square mile in South Bend Indiana. Most of us have yards and single family homes. I find my former home of Indianapolis to be shocking at 2209 people per square mile. Indy is very spread out.
Miami Beach - 12,502 per sq mile
North Miami Beach - 8230 per sq mile
Miami - 6,558 per sq mile
Ft Lauderdale - 5100 per sq mile
There are others that are more dense but many are really small towns on slivers of land.
Ummm? Miami is almost twice that. 362,470 people in 36 sq. miles for a population density of 10,161 people per sq. mile.
Remember to use the city's land area rather than the total area.
I also want to find a southern city that can top that.
Have to go by the 2000 Census - 320 people per square mile.
You do know not all cities are big, population-wise, right? I technically live in a Southern city with its own city utilities, schools, fire and police but the population is only about 27,500.
I think it's a good idea to list both the land area and density of a census tract because that gives a better feel for how dense a place actually is. Otherwise we get misleading numbers for places that have a large amount of parkland/industrial areas/water/airports/etc. which really skew the story a bit. (Chicago might be +12,000 people per square mile for the city as a whole, but there are neighborhoods that are +90,000 per square mile).
Where I'm currently staying in Brooklyn, the census tract is just shy of 2 square miles with a density of +45,000.
This is the definition of sprawl. However some of Orlando suburbs are more dense than parts of the city (like Winter Park) and I am not sure that this statistic takes into consideration all the water area from all the lakes in the area.
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