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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
People enjoy their Louis Vuitton handbags, also improving their mental state. So the fact that you enjoy your lawn doesn't make it any less of a luxury good. Not faulting you for having one, we humans like our luxuries. Let's just understand that's what they are. Like BMWs and Rolexes.
That's not what Veblen is. A Veblen is better the higher the price, and that is not correct for lawns. A lawn doesn't get better if the cost of the lawn is higher.
A lawn is better simply for existing, which makes it a standard good.
Veblen is that the demand is higher the higher the price, instead of the opposite, but instead of getting hung up on wether or not it's a Veblen good, my larger point is that lawns are luxuries like BMWs and Rolexes. Nice if you can afford them but recognize that we've normalized being extra in this way.
Obviously. And my opinion is lawns are expensive designer patches of dirt. Like a Rolls Royce or a Bentley. Really nice, and there's a whole industry surrounding them, and a whole lot of culture surrounding having one but ultimately problematic for society if everyone has to have one of their own. Which comes to the part where there are facts. A house with a lawn takes up more space than the exact same home without a lawn. Adding the lawn increases the footprint of a house which increases size and drops population density, which makes services more expensive because things are simply further apart. No one has to agree with my opinion that lawns are a luxury good, but it is very expensive for everyone to think they want one.
>which makes services more expensive because things are simply further apart
So does adding sewer, water and electricity too. And think of all the density we could get if could get rid of inner walls and stuff people together into one room per house? It doesn't make these items "luxury" for most people in the US though.
Having a large expansive lawn with rocky features, rare plants, water features, and fish, while being perfectly manicured attached to an estate is a way better lawn than a 12x20 green rectangle in the front of a suburban home's lot.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
It takes a lot of resources to provide modern amenities like clean water, sanitary sewers, electricity, gas, telecom lines, roads, etc. Economies of scale make it cheaper to provide these things if people live closer together.
I live where wells, septic systems, and propane delivery by truck are the norm. Even the highways in the state were originally privately built and are maintained largely by tolls.
It seems like there would be a tipping range where it would be a toss-up whether it was more efficient to handle these things individually or in bulk, and I wonder how cities make the decision. Like, it would be wildly impractical to run pipes to every house at one density, but equally impractical to drill wells for every occupant at another density.
I'm now curious how places decide when it's time to make the switch, and how they do it!
Because none of those things are linked. Most cities around the world have pretty extensive parklands, botanic gardens, and public transport links to nature reserves. Crime is area dependent, not density. And noise is mostly linked to car traffic, which is often reduced in higher density areas.
Car traffic might be reduced per capita in higher density areas, but all of it is concentrated and is right near all the people. Multiply by the sirens of ambulance and police that are constantly going somewhere. Compare to a dead-end suburb street which only 5-10 cars have any reason for driving at all.
You've apparently never actually been in a suburb. They typically have random unkempt forests behind each row of houses, and not just a little bit. Like you need a serious walk between houses on different roads, and all of that is a long unbroken piece of nature.
The front of the house near the road has the lawn, but there's a LOT more to suburbs than that.
2 minute walk from where I lived in a suburb was a "forest" as I called it as a child, so large you could get lost. In the suburbs where my relatives live there's more forest with bears, and a there's a creek behind their house.
Yet from the front it's a road with lawns. There's a lot more to suburbs than that road.
Not to mention kids love playing in that road since there's barely any cars. All those car-free threads, about how cars ruin things? Suburban kids already have that: They have barely any cars to contend with.
man I’m curious what state or country this suburb is in? The suburb I grew up in was nothing like that. If anything you’re describing something more on the rural side of things.
Due to my privacy I'd rather not say the city name, but I will say it was the second largest city in a strongly Democratic coastal state.
The largest city in that state was one of those large city hell-holes with too many people crowded in too small a space. But the second largest city was quite nice once you were not too near the downtown.
It’s interesting how much variation there are for suburbs. I’m mostly used to the types that exist in CA which are very different from what you describe and I am personally trying to avoid settling on. Also as someone who lives in a “large city hell-hole”, I personally greatly prefer it to the suburbs I grew up in. Fwiw a lot of the urbanism movement I’m familiar with prefer rural areas and cities over suburbs. You’re right that cities can’t exist without rural areas and the idea is to make more areas rural, not decrease it. The main issue that is brought up is suburban sprawl, which I think is different from what you’re describing. I think the main idea is to avoid cities like LA and prefer more density like Chicago or NYC.
Indeed, some suburbs have a lot of nature. I've encountered suburbs where individual houses are in the middle of the woods, off the main road, and yet not 10 miles away are developments where all the houses all look identical because they were built by the same developer and have a lawn in front, a backyard, and no wilderness whatsoever; right outside that development are busy streets on all sides.
I've lived in suburbs that are incorporated cities with population above a hundred thousand, and are eminently as pedestrian-friendly as some larger cities, but are tiny in comparison to the city that they're suburbs of (with more than a million people within that city's limits). And there are suburbs where you cannot get to the nearest grocery store without getting in a car and driving on the highway for 5 minutes.
You can't paint all suburbs as having lots of nature and being devoid of cars, just as you can't say all cities are identical.
Yeah, I grew up in a town like that in CT. It's nice, for sure. I would call it semirural rather than suburban, though.
The issue with lovely semirural living is that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that. It's a privilage to live in house surrounded by woods with grocery store a 15 minutes drive away. Many people (not you, congrats) need to live very close to one another, and the best, happiest, most sustainable way for them to do that is in a dense city with good transit, good sidewalks, and limited auto traffic.
That is all not to mention the economics of suburban and semirural living. Those nice roads with little traffic? They are crushingly expensive. Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.
It's not semirural - there are no farms or fields anywhere, and there are plenty of houses. It's just they are spread far enough apart for people to have space.
> that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that.
That's really not true. Half of the US lives in cities, half don't. You really think the US is so completely full there's no room for those city dwellers to have more space?
According to my quick math there enough room for 40 times the population of the US to each person (not each family - each person) to have a huge suburban lot.
> They are crushingly expensive.
No, they are not. That's an urban (ha!) myth. Roads are really not that expensive once you move out of dense cities. Rural roads cost around half or less of urban ones, and they last around 4 times as long since traffic is much lower (5-10 years vs 25-40 years). So a rural road costs like 1/10 an urban one.
And since according to http://demographia.com/db-intlsub.htm suburbs have around 1/3 the population density, suburban roads are actually 3 times cheaper per person!
Hardly "crushingly expensive".
> Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.
And cities would not exist if not for all the goods made in non-urban areas. Cities have tons of high-revenue, high-tax services, but they don't actually make anything. That's all done outside the city.
If everyone moved to the city everyone would die - there would be no food or anything else.
There's a balance in the world between cities and rural and suburban area, and you mess with that balance at your peril! You can end up with terrible imbalances and very expensive food and other goods.
And don't forget you need all those rural roads, or nobody could get any goods to cities. So be doubly cautious about suggesting fewer rural areas because of "road costs".
My experience is that dead end suburb streets with no reason to drive on them are constantly used by hoons doing burnouts or modified motorbikes making loads of noise at 1AM
Note: having lived in Melbourne CBD, cities can indeed be loud, e.g. at 1 am on a Saturday (bass from clubs, and apparently drunk people really enjoy going Woooo!!! really loudly all the time)
Honestly, I moved to the suburbs and hate it with a passion. I miss density, I miss city noise, and I miss the unquantifiable energy I get from a city.
This thread has been an interesting read, city and non-city people literally like what the other sides loathes.
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).
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadhttps://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
I don't think this takes into account water around cities. For NYC harbour south of downtown pull us down?
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.
If your lawn is a Veblen good you are doing it wrong.
That's not what Veblen is. A Veblen is better the higher the price, and that is not correct for lawns. A lawn doesn't get better if the cost of the lawn is higher.
A lawn is better simply for existing, which makes it a standard good.
So does adding sewer, water and electricity too. And think of all the density we could get if could get rid of inner walls and stuff people together into one room per house? It doesn't make these items "luxury" for most people in the US though.
But you've described a more expensive lawn that is actually better, which makes it a normal good.
You are simply wrong about lawns being a Veblen, and you should acknowledge that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems like there would be a tipping range where it would be a toss-up whether it was more efficient to handle these things individually or in bulk, and I wonder how cities make the decision. Like, it would be wildly impractical to run pipes to every house at one density, but equally impractical to drill wells for every occupant at another density.
I'm now curious how places decide when it's time to make the switch, and how they do it!
A single large park inside a dense city is far more nature-rich than acres upon acres of suburban lawns are.
The front of the house near the road has the lawn, but there's a LOT more to suburbs than that.
2 minute walk from where I lived in a suburb was a "forest" as I called it as a child, so large you could get lost. In the suburbs where my relatives live there's more forest with bears, and a there's a creek behind their house.
Yet from the front it's a road with lawns. There's a lot more to suburbs than that road.
Not to mention kids love playing in that road since there's barely any cars. All those car-free threads, about how cars ruin things? Suburban kids already have that: They have barely any cars to contend with.
The largest city in that state was one of those large city hell-holes with too many people crowded in too small a space. But the second largest city was quite nice once you were not too near the downtown.
Indeed, some suburbs have a lot of nature. I've encountered suburbs where individual houses are in the middle of the woods, off the main road, and yet not 10 miles away are developments where all the houses all look identical because they were built by the same developer and have a lawn in front, a backyard, and no wilderness whatsoever; right outside that development are busy streets on all sides.
I've lived in suburbs that are incorporated cities with population above a hundred thousand, and are eminently as pedestrian-friendly as some larger cities, but are tiny in comparison to the city that they're suburbs of (with more than a million people within that city's limits). And there are suburbs where you cannot get to the nearest grocery store without getting in a car and driving on the highway for 5 minutes.
You can't paint all suburbs as having lots of nature and being devoid of cars, just as you can't say all cities are identical.
The issue with lovely semirural living is that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that. It's a privilage to live in house surrounded by woods with grocery store a 15 minutes drive away. Many people (not you, congrats) need to live very close to one another, and the best, happiest, most sustainable way for them to do that is in a dense city with good transit, good sidewalks, and limited auto traffic.
That is all not to mention the economics of suburban and semirural living. Those nice roads with little traffic? They are crushingly expensive. Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.
> that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that.
That's really not true. Half of the US lives in cities, half don't. You really think the US is so completely full there's no room for those city dwellers to have more space?
According to my quick math there enough room for 40 times the population of the US to each person (not each family - each person) to have a huge suburban lot.
> They are crushingly expensive.
No, they are not. That's an urban (ha!) myth. Roads are really not that expensive once you move out of dense cities. Rural roads cost around half or less of urban ones, and they last around 4 times as long since traffic is much lower (5-10 years vs 25-40 years). So a rural road costs like 1/10 an urban one.
And since according to http://demographia.com/db-intlsub.htm suburbs have around 1/3 the population density, suburban roads are actually 3 times cheaper per person!
Hardly "crushingly expensive".
> Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.
And cities would not exist if not for all the goods made in non-urban areas. Cities have tons of high-revenue, high-tax services, but they don't actually make anything. That's all done outside the city.
If everyone moved to the city everyone would die - there would be no food or anything else.
There's a balance in the world between cities and rural and suburban area, and you mess with that balance at your peril! You can end up with terrible imbalances and very expensive food and other goods.
And don't forget you need all those rural roads, or nobody could get any goods to cities. So be doubly cautious about suggesting fewer rural areas because of "road costs".
Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud.
Also, construction sites, and road works.
Nearly constant noise.
This thread has been an interesting read, city and non-city people literally like what the other sides loathes.
Question/challenge: can anyone find any other city with a greater density? Dhaka is close but has a lower peak and tapers off faster.
You can change it to other measurements, including straight density.
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?
"80.000 people live within 0 km of Paris." (ditto, 2 millions live there).
There are many other cities where the numbers are absurdly wrong. Don't take this tool too seriously, if at all.