Which feels most newly settled?

[ue]

Originally Posted by isaidso

Haven't been to most of these places but Western Australia looks newest to me. To the above post, industrialization happened the same time in Canada that it did in the UK. The difference in Canada was that vast tracts of our south were still frontier back then.

And yet there was a brain drain from Quebec and the Maritimes to the far more industrialized New England in the 19th century. Montreal may be old, but it didn't grow at the rate that American cities did in the 19th century. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, were sizeably larger, and except for Boston, still are.

[Commentariat]

Originally Posted by Doug

I've lived in Alberta, BC, Texas and Western Australia

Alberta edges out Nevada for rawness due to geographic isolation and historical irrelevance. Nevada had a mining boom and railroad well in advance of Alberta's homesteading boom of the early 1900's. Plus Nevada has long been in California's orbit. Southern Alberta was the last piece of North America to be explored for several reasons: indifference from the federal government towards western expanaion, remoteness, rugged terrain, no navigable bodies of water, aggressive indigenous population, too cold and arid for agriculture, poor forest reserves, no known mineral deposits at the time.

Western Australia, while more isolated, already had a population well over 100,000 by 1900 due to mining and whaling booms. Perth was about 60k in 1900 and 350k in 1950. In comparison, Calgary was about 4k in 1900 and 115k in 1950.

I would add Utah and Arizona to that list.

I live in Western Australia and have visited the south-west US. Nevada feels more newly settled than the south-west of Western Australia (where nearly everyone in the state lives). Las Vegas doesn't feel anything like central Perth - which was founded in 1829, has a proper downtown with plenty of colonial buildings, 3 century-old rail lines serving a bunch of old 'High Street' neighbourhoods and a decent number of former streetcar suburbs (the streetcars were ripped up in the 1950s). I haven't been to Alberta.

In fact all of Australia's state capitals feel reasonably well established to me. It's the second-tier cities that feel most newly-settled, eg the Gold Coast (which barely existed until the 1960s), Darwin (almost abandoned in WW2 and then completely destroyed by cyclone in 1974) and Canberra (founded in a sheep paddock in the early 20th century and with only 17,000 people in 1947).