How dense is your city? | Hacker News Reader

How dense is your city?

citydensity.com

66 pointsepivosism68 comments

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:

https://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

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).

Accompanying tweet thread: https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Nolan_/status/17641429989949484...

Interesting, NYC vs Tokyo. NYC is winning up until 20km. We need higher density queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Jersey.

I don't think this takes into account water around cities. For NYC harbour south of downtown pull us down?

Is higher density “winning?”

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.

Better for the planet, better food and cultural options, shorter travel times for typical daily activities... in my book it definitely is.

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.

> doesn't make it any less of a luxury good

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.

Things you consider luxury may not be such for others and vice versa. You cannot really state your opinions as a fact and expect everyone to agree.

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.

Yeah my Rolex helps my mental state. I can read the time with it and it is useful for deep sea diving.

And you can do that with a cheaper watch also. That makes in a Veblen, but a more expensive lawn is not a better lawn. So a lawn is not a Veblen.

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.

That's the opposite of what I said. A Veblen good means the same item, if priced higher, is somehow more desirable.

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.

A Veblen good is something for which demand goes up as it gets more expensive, not for the same item. A Rolex isn't the same as a Casio.

Sounds like an urban park.

Not if you enjoy gardening.

Community gardens exist.

A lawn is a pretty boring garden.

Lawns exist in part because we made it too dangerous for kids to play in the street (this obviously will have a good deal of variance by location).

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.

One thing doesn’t mean the other. See Hong Kong and Tokyo.

> 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.

By and large: yes.

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.

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.

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 Hong Kong core, makes sense because the HK core is super-dense

Nice find! Yes, makes a lot of sense that HK is also going to be dense. And it’s islandic geography could explain why it drops off.

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.

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?

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.

"0 people live within 5 km of Warsaw." (actual value is close to 2 millions).

"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.

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

The other interesting comparison is how similar SF and Stockholm are.

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.

It would be awesome to write/read the selected cities into/from the URL so selections could be shared easily.

I'm always getting this error message

   Disconnected from the server.
   Reload

Reply on news.ycombinator.com