2012-04-06
post/20597485342
Three more from the Atlantic Cities post of photos of world leaders and models:
- Then-Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok walks carefully through the miniature streets of Amsterdam at the amusement park “Madurodam” in The Hague. Photo credit: Reuters/Str Old, March 27, 1998
- Franz Muentefering, then-leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, places a building into a model railway during an exhibition in 2009. Organizers invited most of the German political parties to design their ‘Idealland’ (Ideal country) within the model. Photo credit: Reuters/Christian Charisius, September 5, 2009
- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin inspects a model of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport during a visit on March 28, 2011. Photo credit: Reuters/Alexei Nikolsky
2012-03-13
The Sizes of Cities
What’s the largest city in the world? This seemingly simple question is actually rather complicated to answer. In my post Concentric Londons, I noted how you can define the city in various ways (and I still missed a few), while my complaints about the interesting but flawed visualisation showing “how much room would you need for the world’s population if the city were as dense as…” noted that the cities picked were defined very differently.
It turns out that the BBC’s excellent More or Less tackled the issue in a special edition, which (thankfully) is also available as a BBC News Magazine article (for those of us who prefer reading words to hearing them). After noting some of the problems I’ve covered - is a city the same as the government region defining it, or is it a contiguous urban area, or perhaps a zone of influence? - they settle on Tokyo/Yokohama, at 30 million plus, as the most reasonable answer to the question.
Curiously, it turns out that there is no official UN (or other reliable worldwide) definition of a city. Where Paris excludes its periphery, London extends nearly to the M25; where New York excludes Jersey City, Greater London expanded in the 1960s to swallow chunks of Essex. That’s not even to consider cities such as Cairo, Nairobi, or Rio de Janeiro, where informal building means a density and sprawl that’s a laissez-faire economist’s dream.
However, that wasn’t the end of the show. The final section covered China’s cities, which, if you believe the numbers, are growing like nothing on earth. However, the numbers may not be that trustworthy. Official statistics, as noted by guest Professor Kam Wing Chan, conflate cities with provinces, which can be largely rural, inflating estimates by as much as a factor of five:
The largest city in China is actually Shanghai. It is commonly thought to have a population of 20 million, but Professor Chan thinks 16 million is a better estimate.
He says everyone just loves to think China’s cities are bigger than they actually are. He has even had to correct fellow experts at a world conference on global megacities of the future.
One thing’s for certain: you can’t take the numbers at face value.
2012-02-21
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Maps of London and New York by Isotype Institute (1944)
I rarely repost things that are this popular, but how could I not note this comparison of the growth of two of my favourite cities, and the wonderful way the Isotype designers made their growth clear?
As well as the obvious difference between the organic and grid layouts in the two, I also noticed the small changes in water use (note the new Millwall docks on the Isle of Dogs) in London and the much more obvious infilling in New York and New Jersey.
(via seanaes)
2012-01-31
post/16839532341
William Gibson, interviewed at The Verge.
Whether it’s a sign of that same desire to burrow under the surface of the city, or just because I have a lack of imagination, I’ve found myself visiting the same places repeatedly: New York five times, now (and more to come, I’m sure), Berlin twice (and, again, I’d love to return), Paris perhaps four times (with more yet to see), San Francisco (three times before I moved here), and of course London (multiple times before I moved, and then ten years of infatuation). I like Gibson’s justification, anyway.
2012-01-24
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2012-01-10
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William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211 in the Paris Review.
My world seems to be a series of tightly-connected cities, separated by a series of scenery for viewing from trains or planes.
2011-05-09
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Edwin Heathcote quoting Tyler Brûlé in the Financial Times piece Liveable v lovable, critiquing those “best cities to live in” lists that never list the cities people actually live in (notably London and New York). It’s doing the rounds, and it’s well worth a read.
This quote leapt out at me, because (as I mentioned in my post about driving), one of the best things about San Francisco is, apparently, that it’s easy to leave. Call me a dyed in the wool urbanophile, but isn’t the point of a good city that you don’t want to?
2011-03-23
post/4038393782
“If the world’s 6.9 billion people lived in one city, how large would that city be if it were as dense as…”
When I first saw this map, I was slightly peeved that London appeared to have lower density than San Francisco, or Paris. I lived in London for ten years, and have been in SF for a few months. I hope residents of the latter won’t be too offended if I say that, all too often, even relatively central neighbourhoods feel more than a little suburban.
I decided to go and have a deeper look at the figures. Firstly, at the original post, Tim De Chant (who designed the maps), writes that they’re based on
Strictly city limits. So the San Francisco map, for example, only uses density data for the city of San Francisco and does not factor in Oakland, San Jose, etc.
Now, San Francisco is a city of 600 km², with a population of roughly 800,000. It’s embedded in a larger “combined statistical area” - including the aforementioned cities - of nearly 8 million. The densities for the two? 6,688.4/km² and 320/km² respectively. There’s almost a factor of twenty difference there.
By contrast, London’s nearly 8 million fit into an area barely one-fifteenth that of the Bay Area - making the entire city nearly match San Francisco’s density. The central London boroughs - like Islington, where I lived for six years - come top of the list of districts by population density in the UK, with double the population per square kilometre of SF. (I haven’t bothered to calculate the density of the old LCC boroughs, but my bet would be they handily outrank SF, although I doubt they approach NYC.)
Similarly, the incredible showing by Paris is helped by the fact that the city is still defined by its medieval extent, excluding a large chunk of its metropolitan area: to paraphrase Wikipedia, the city has a population of two million, but the metropolitan area has a population of nearly twelve. The density of the latter is roughly one seventh that of the former - and lower than that of London of SF.
This is, perhaps, too much effort to put into a single graphic, especially one that does such a good job of showing how sprawling a car-centric US city can become (hello, Houston). However, it’s an interesting exercise in noting that defining a city is harder than it may appear.
2010-10-19
post/1352227388
The Map Room: Darker Than You Think
the original Light Pollution Atlas was systematically biased by the fact that snow was on the ground when the underlying satellite measurements were taken. Lorenz recalculated the light pollution for the U.S. and southern Canada based on snow-free satellite observations, and the whole northern part of the area came out roughly one full zone darker. That means that the original atlas overestimate the skyglow in this area by a factor of three.
Even so, the Bay Area sticks out as a red spot. At least there are some good dark skies within a (relatively) easy drive. (via aemkai’s ffffound)
