[rsynnott]

A fairly common US city plan seems to be: small ultra-high-density core with a bunch of skyscrapers, fading almost immediately to rather low-density, and then shortly afterwards to virtually no-density. European cities tend to be generally higher-density (no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris), but with fewer skyscrapers.

[lolinder]

> no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris

This seems off. If you consult this map and chart [0] Paris seems to do something very similar to NYC with regard to density. There's the city of Paris proper (75 on the map) which has a slightly higher population than Manhattan but a much lower density (52k/sq mi in Paris vs 74k). Then as soon as you get out of that 40 sq mi (about the size of the Bronx) into the the petite couronne density drops to well below that of any one of the five boroughs besides Staten Island.

So, yeah, if you take an area the size of a single NYC borough in the Paris region that's drawn specifically around the densest population zone then it has a higher density than NYC taken as a whole. But if you compare most-dense-zone to most-dense-zone then NYC is denser by a fairly wide margin, and if you compare areas that are of a similar size rather than only including the City of Paris proper then NYC wins again.

It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris

[myrmidon]

> It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.

I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC, so comparisons between NYC boroughs (which are each almost as big as the city of Paris) and Paris' surrounding departments are clearly favorable for NYC.

If you compare cities of similar size, i.e. Paris with Los Angeles (which is still bigger, both city and metro area), then the european capital is significantly ahead in density (and I did not cherry pick Los Angeles specifically, it's the same for Chicago, Houston, etc.), and the difference is very significant: Even the core of those US cities (excepting NYC) is less dense than the 3 inner Parisian suburb departments (!!).

[demosthanos]

> I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC

Isn't that just another way of saying that they drew the city boundaries differently than they did in NYC? If you extend the boundaries out to the 814 km^2 of Greater Paris, that gives it a fairly similar population to NYC (7m compared to 8.8m) with a very similar area (814 km^2 to 778 km^2).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris

[myrmidon]

My point is that the conditions at those boundaries are not comparable: Greater Paris is pretty much a whole metropolitan area, which is "non-urban"-ish at the boundaries. If you take a slice out of NYC with the same population/area, then that is still only a part of a (bigger than Greater Paris) metro area of like 20M people...