I just don't consider suburbs very urban. The car-dependent lifestyle, to me, is... rural, really. Mount Pearl, Markham, all those types of areas just... don't count to me. They're lost population.
Empire Avenue was the ring road of St. John's in 1949. The entire city's population lived in neighbourhoods with about 5,000 people per km/sq minimum, because that's the density of those districts today. There was none of that North American sprawl. The rowhouses ended, and farmland/farmsteads began.
This, for example, was the extreme west end of St. John's, the edge of the city. Density just ends like a brick wall:
And this is the Little Canada neighbourhood, built immediately after Confederation to showcase our new, improved, superior way of living. And this is actually an especially dense street in the neighbourhood:
To me, it still feels like that. I need the street level density. Towers surrounded by highways, surface parking lots, car-dependent suburbs... all of that might as well be farmland to me. I hate it.
And I find when you visit European cities, their downtowns feel as large as those of North American cities at a fraction of the population.
There are easily towns of 40,000-60,000 in Europe that FEEL as large as St. John's.
A great example, the city most Newfoundlanders came from: Waterford, Ireland.
49,000 people.
Looks and feels exactly like St. John's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterford
And I'm not insulting my city - all of yours are just the same to me.