For those who liked this, I frequently come back to this visual which displays the distribution within a city in an arguably more visually appealing format:
Love this!
Fyi I noticed Kaohsiung was listed incorrectly as Kaohsiung (China) instead of Kaohsiung (Taiwan). Strange as Taipei was listed correctly as Taipei (Taiwan).
Have you tried living in the dense cities like Mumbai, India or Manila, Philippines? It's quite clear that with population density, trash output also increases and is harder to manage. By experience, it's not a pleasant way to live or for the environment. It's a lot dirtier.
> Have you tried living in the dense cities like Mumbai, India or Manila, Philippines?
I've lived in Hong Kong, which is a similar order of density, and which I loved; it was a feeling of being vibrantly alive that's hard to duplicate in a more spread-out environment. Also spent a decent amount of time in Mumbai and enjoyed that - though I might not have if I were one of its poorer residents. Would it be worse than being poor in a village? Not sure.
> It's quite clear that with population density, trash output also increases and is harder to manage.
You're saying that 10 people per km2 produce more trash each than 5 people per km2? What's the mechanism at work there? I'd think denser cities means smaller houses and therefore less room for spurious stuff.
And worse for the people who live there. I get anxiety just thinking of living in a dense city. Everyone I know who left a dense city never wants to go back - they talk like people who suffered from Stockholm syndrome and were now freed.
And that doesn't even touch the economics: For the most part cities make money by services and not by physical items. Services are very lucrative, so on paper cities make tons of money. But they don't make anything people need to live.
Virtually every single thing people buy in a city comes from outside the city. It's not a lifestyle that everyone can adopt. For the most part there's a balance, with some living in a city and some rural - but people should be extremely cautious about any kind of policy that can mess with that balance.
First, no one can force you or anyone else to live in a dense urban area. In fact, the denser the urban core the more less dense options right outside the city core for people such as yourself. Second, you are in the minority. Dense cities are dense for a reason: far from being anxiety-provoking, many people find urban areas very desirable place to live.
I left the city for the country and ended up clawing my way back in. Cities, especially dense, walkable ones, are wonderful. Better still if they remove cars.
> Everyone I know who left a dense city never wants to go back
Okay. I don't know who you know but it doesn't sound like the people that I know.
> And worse for the people who live there. I get anxiety just thinking of living in a dense city.
After having lived in some small towns, I get anxiety thinking about not living in a big city. Different strokes. As it turns out, most people in most countries do choose to live in cities.
Lawns are a Veblen good, like Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior handbags. That we don't see them as ostentatious the same way is a matter of culture. By all means, people should live where they want to live; urban, suburban, rural. But let's be honest about things.
Lawns are a place where I play, or my kids play. Or where I go to just sit and enjoy nature. They are also decoration (flower bed for example) to make my surroundings more pleasant which helps my mental state.
If your lawn is a Veblen good you are doing it wrong.
My wife and I bought a house a in the suburbs and both of us badly want to move back. So now know someone who left a dense city and wants to go back. Being able to walk places is a luxury we won't overlook again.
Suburbs are the worst of both worlds. Urban areas are super convenient, rural areas are super private, and suburban areas are typically neither.
I grew up in a city, and I am not a city person. I love living in the boonies (I live on an 80-acre farm surrounded by farms and forests that are even larger), and even so, I would rather live in a dense urban area than in the 'burbs.
I currently have a shorter commute to the local shops and supermarket (8 minutes) than many people have in the suburbs. It's hard to imagine giving up privacy for an even worse commute.
I'd say that density is generally a good thing, IMO. The more people live in a place, generally access to things is more convenient, commutes are shorter, etc. Low density generally means sprawl.
Higher density cities are the ecologically least damaging mode of housing and provide more of what makes cities great: more people doing interesting things, more opportunities for interactions, education, access to health care, etc.
Now there are plenty of people who don't want that, but then they don't want to be in an urban environment at all. So I'm not saying it's winning for every person. But on a continuum from ultra-rural to ultra dense I think a graph of "quality of life for residents-by-choice" would be a saddle curve. Less dense cities, and most suburbs (by the US definition) are neither fish nor fowl.
This is really great. I want to review this for everywhere I've been, because the variation in how gov'ts do statistics is hiding so much of what's actually going on there.
It’s really helpful to have such a visualisation tool. I’ve felt Mumbai as being quite dense (partially because of the sea around it), and throwing a few “most dense cities” like Dhaka/Manila/Tokyo/Jakarta so far still results in Mumbai having the highest cumulative density values (made much more explicit when excluding large water bodies).
Question/challenge: can anyone find any other city with a greater density? Dhaka is close but has a lower peak and tapers off faster.
The reason HK is not more dense in general is because much of the TAR is unlivable water and mountains that have to be worked around (lots of bridges and tunnels). Once you just count people on livable land, its density shoots up. It isn’t like other cities where density ever tapers off, it’s just clumps of apartment skyscrapers here and there.
Note that the default graph is 'weighted density', to show you "how dense an area feels for the typical person who lives there." I didn't see where it says how it's calculated.
You can change it to other measurements, including straight density.
I love this project, but I find some of the UI decisions baffling.
For instance, as I add cities to my comparison, the colors of the cities I already have in the chart keep changing. Did anyone bother testing it, because that led to some serious confusion?
A question I’ve often wondered: how is density measured? Yes, I get it’s the total number of people per square mile, but how does work in detail? Do we count people if they only have their residential home there? If so, it means commercial buildings detracts toward this number. This tilts high density ratings towards residential areas like Somerville MA, which has no downtown to speak of, fewer public parks, and lacking in amenities. What it does have is lots and lots of run-down triple decker residential housing far as the eye can see. The city looks like a low-rent suburb rather than one of the densest cities in New England.
Interesting how San Francisco has almost the same density as NYC when you get to 2km. I wonder if this has to do with density of old neighborhoods surrounding fidi out-densitying most hoods in nyc
According to this site, ever city in Canada is more densely populated than Toronto. It says 10 000 people live within 18 km of Toronto versus 1.5 million for Vancouver.
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/2/7480993/population-density-visu...
It helps explain the low-density feel that a city like London has compared to most large non-European cities.
The original source is the third panel here: https://issuu.com/lsecities/docs/hongkong2011newspaper/9