[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...