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Old Posted Feb 10, 2012, 4:10 PM
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Cirrus Cirrus is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Washington, DC
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Not to turn this in to a versus thread, but I'll defend the statement:

Vancouver has undeniably more residential towers than Seattle, but that isn't the lone determining factor of "big cityness" any more than height of a city's tallest commercial tower is. And in many other factors, Seattle is undeniably a bigger city. Here's an easy one: Amount of office space in the inner city (info source):
  • Central Seattle (downtown and adjacent neighborhoods) has just shy of 50 million square feet of office space.
  • Central Vancouver, including the Broadway corridor, has 26 million square feet of office space.
  • The entire Vancouver metro area has about 43 million square feet.
So downtown Seattle has twice as much office space as downtown Vancouver, and more than the entire Vancouver region including all its suburbs. It isn't just that Seattle has a couple of taller skyscrapers; it's that the scale of office development in Seattle is off the chart compared to Vancouver. And that doesn't even include Seattle's suburbs (which have another 45 million square feet or so). Because of this, it wouldn't surprise me at all if downtown Seattle has a larger daytime population than downtown Vancouver, even if Vancouver may have many more people at night.

Of course, office square footage isn't the sole determining factor either. But the point is, central Seattle can lay claim to being bigger than central Vancouver in a number of ways.

Here's another interesting comparison: The central part of both cities shown at the same scale. And for added reference, I've pasted Vancouver's central peninsula (minus Stanley Park) on top of downtown Seattle, and then colored it red. To me, the urban part of Seattle (nevermind the suburbs) feels quite a lot larger than the urban part of Vancouver, even if the urban part of Vancouver is denser. Of course the peninsula isn't all there is to urban Vancouver, but it a psychological barrier if nothing else, and it is quite small.

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Last edited by Cirrus; Feb 10, 2012 at 4:22 PM.
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