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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

Wow, 10,000 per km² sounds crazy ambitious. By those standards, Germany is a ghost land, cities here barely reach those numbers in the densely populated parts, certainly not on average.

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Keep in mind they are built out for that density, having comparably much less density (much closer to a German small town) before development.

Berlin has 3,944 inhabitants per km2. If not even that city reaches the standard, I think the criteria must be flawed. My city is the third largest in Mexico and it has less than 3500/km2.

Or maybe we need an article about ghost countries.

I guess the standards necessarily are different for a city of skyscrapers

Pudong was definitely in that range before it was developed. Chinese densities are completely different from the rest of the word. No one calls a 3500/km2 area a ghost city of it is built for 3500/km2, but if it’s built for 10k/km2 with lots of 30 story apartment blocks, there are a lot of empty units and you can play football in the overbuilt 8 lane streets.

Berlin has forests within its borders.

So does Mumbai (the Sanjay Gandhi National Park) and it still supports a density of 73,000 people/sq km.

What? Wikipedia has Mumbai at just 21k/sqkm, and even that seems to be megacity (urban) density, not its metro density, which is only 4,700/sqkm. I assume the national park is in the latter and not the former.

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_Metropolitan_Region

> Wow, 10,000 per km² sounds crazy ambitious. By those standards, Germany is a ghost land, cities here barely reach those numbers in the densely populated parts, certainly not on average.

Yeah, but to get those levels, they fill blocks with dozens of identical 25 story apartment buildings. E.g.: https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/node_i...

They are usually 32 stories high since that is how far they can go with concrete.

That isn't inherent to getting the density though. You could design them all differently if you wanted.

You could find an example of a row of identical buildings in any country, it doesn't prove anything.

It isn't inherent, but it sure is attention grabbing. In my experience, cookie-cutter construction is far more common, at a far larger scale, and far more obvious in China than in any other country I've visited.

By Chinese standards, most places are barely populated. They are a fifth of the world.

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