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Old Posted Sep 14, 2017, 6:27 AM
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logan5 logan5 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123 View Post
One way I've thought about this is that the population of a city provides an upper bound to how much activity it can support. North American cities are generally far below the upper bound. Maybe they are at 5% of the upper bound as far as urban life goes. Or less in places like Phoenix. Some people never visit the urban core of the metropolitan area they live in, and others spend all of their time there. We can think of a 5% city as being a place where the average person spends about 5% of their time in the urban parts, doing things that impact what you'd care about when participating in public life in those areas.

This model is a bit oversimplified but it hints at why city size doesn't matter much. If you've got places operating at 5% or 80%, a city of 500,000 can be like a city of 8 million.

The realities in North America also explain why people think you need a metropolitan area of 5 million people to have anything interesting. You do if you only ever see 5% of those people. But that only works out to 250,000. Conversely it turns out that our North American standards are kind of low and an urban core with an effective population of 250,000 people counts as relatively large. So it's not surprising that somewhere in the world we can find mid-sized cities of 500,000 or 1,000,000 that function like large urban areas in North America.

I don't really want to get into it but there's some variety in North America too, though much less than what is found in the rest of the world. We have our 2% cities and our 20% cities. That's still a factor of 10 difference. So it's wrong to assume in general that the 2 million person North American city must have more going on than the 1 million person North American city.
I'm sure you're right but could you name a 1 million person city that has more going on (by that I think you mean pedestrian activity) than a 2 million city? My assumption was that 1-2 million person cities pretty much resembled each other quite closely. Vancouver (and a few others maybe) being the exception.
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