Demographia World Urban Areas March 2014

[Gresto]

Originally Posted by babybackribs2314

Mumbai lacks the infrastructure necessary to capture those people into its metro area. NYC has one of the most complicated & expansive infrastructures in the world surrounding it, with all types of transit & roadways feeding into the center city. Mumbai is in a developing country where cows still wander the streets...

I agree. The cities are not comparable at all. Mumbai also has one of the world's largest slums. Millions of people live in dire poverty.

[ChiSoxRox]

30 million in Jakarta...whoa.

Eye candy:


Source

Also, the title for largest city in the Amazon Basin is pretty close:

Belem, Brazil: 1,945,000
Santa Cruz, Bolivia: 1,924,000
La Paz, Bolivia: 1,897,000
Manaus, Brazil: 1,792,000

[LMich]

Originally Posted by memph

Anyways, I suspect what's going on here is that basically demographia is using local definitions of urban areas in many cases, rather than applying a single definition to all cities. Doing so would require a fair bit of effort.

This is exactly what was done. I noticed right off the bat that the American listings simply use the existing Census Bureau urbanized area measurements. BTW, someone else made a fairly good point up thread that the Census Bureau could significantly increase the density requirements for what's considered "urban" and knock off maybe hundreds of square miles of space and still have nearly the same population as before. I'd personally like to see the Census Bureau tighten their criteria.

[chris08876]

Originally Posted by Gresto

I agree. The cities are not comparable at all. Mumbai also has one of the world's largest slums. Millions of people live in dire poverty.

Mumbai is deceptive when looking at it from the air. When you see Tokyo from the air, you can tell that the population of 35mil exists. With Mumbai and also Lagos, it gives the illusion that it is much smaller yet when we see figures like that, its huge. I guess most of Mumbai and Lagos population lives in shanty towns and low rises hidden by trees because from the aerials, it looks way smaller? Even though statistically its not small at all.

[MolsonExport]

The biggest monster of them all is the Pearl River Delta. Continuous urban area, upwards of 120 Million people, containing: Guangzhou (12.70M), Shenzhen (10.36M), Zhuhai (1.56M), Dongguan (8.22M), Zhongshan (3.12M), Foshan (7.19M), Huizhou (4.60M), Jiangmen (4.48M) and Zhaoqing, and as well as the special administrative areas of Hong Kong (7.06M) and Macau (0.54M).

Yangtze River Delta is a continguous urban area containing over 105 Million in an area of 99,600 km^2 (38,500 m^2), containing Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Ningbo, Wuxi, Nantong, Shaoxing, Changzhou, Jiaxing, Taizhou, Yangzhou, Yancheng, Zhenjiang, Huzhou, Huai'an, Zhoushan, Quzhou, Ma'anshan, and Hefei.

[SHiRO]

120 million is (more than) the population of Guangdong Province. The PRD is actually in the neighbourhood of 60 million (65 million with Hong Kong and Macau). Still a beast and by some standards a combined metro area (it would also be one of the largest in the world in area, even rivaling/exceeding New York CSA depending on definition) or even a continuous urban area.

YRD is also pretty impressive but I wouldn't call it a continuous urban area. It's something between a Megalopolis and a combined metropolitan area ("CSA").



EDIT-



2010 Census (2011 for Hong Kong and Macau)

Sub provincial cities:

Guangzhou (9)
12,700,800
7,434 km2

Shenzhen (21)
10,357,938
1,953 km2


Prefecture level cities

Dongguan (10)
8,220,237
2,465 km2

Foshan (8)
7,194,311
3,798 km2

Zhongshan (19)
3,120,884
1,784 km2

Zhuhai (20)
1,560,229
1,653 km2


Parts of prefecture level cities

Jiangmen (18)

Jianghai District
254,365
107 km2

Pengjiang District
719,120
325 km2

Xinhui District
849,155
1,260 km2


Huizhou (11)

Huicheng District
1,579,691
1,410 km2

Huiyang District
764,816
1,262 km2


Zhaoqing (6)

Duanzhou District
479,344
152 km2

Dinghu District
164,701
506 km2

Gaoyao
753,357
2,206 km2

Sihui
542,882
1,258 km2


Subtotal
49,261,830
27,573 km2


Hong Kong SAR
7,071,576
1,104 km2


Macau SAR
552,503
30 km2


Total Pearl River Delta
56,885,909
28,707 km2

[memph]

Do you know if China keeps track of commuting statistics? That could determine whether or not the PRD cities would be like a CSA.

[chris08876]

The Census Bureau in China has an incredible challenge ahead of them. I'm not sure how they count all of these changes without difficulty; their organization must be massive, and overworked. 1.3 billion is a lot of people!

[The Chemist]

Originally Posted by memph

Do you know if China keeps track of commuting statistics? That could determine whether or not the PRD cities would be like a CSA.

Chinese cities don't have very well developed suburban rail systems the way large European cities and Tokyo do. So it's unlikely that a huge number of people commute daily from regional cities into the heart of PRD/YRD. However, due to increasing housing costs and continued development of at least metro rail systems out into the suburbs (Shanghai's Metro, for example, now links into Kunshan in neighbouring Jiangsu province, and will eventually be connected to the Metro system in Suzhou), I'd say that the number of people who do commute is rising. I'd be interested to see actual numbers, but I don't know if they exist.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

according to those stats, Dhaka, Bangladesh somehow manages to squeeze 14,816,000 people into just 130 sq. miles! holy density batman!

That's a population density of 44,000 inh. per km². Both Paris, Manhattan, and Barcelona manage to have higher population densities in some of their neighborhoods, but obviously not over 130 sq miles!

Here below are the three stretches of urban land with the highest population densities in the rich developed world (Paris may have an area with an even higher population density than the one below, in Belleville, but I didn't make the calculations for Belleville because it involves combining lots of census tracts in 4 different arrondissements, which is tedious).

All maps are at the same scale.

Manhattan (in Upper East Side):



Paris (behind Montmartre Hill; the Montmartrois have abandoned Montmartre Hill since WW2 and left it to tourists and tourist stores, and they now live at the northern foot of the hill, where the tourists never go):



Barcelona (this area straddles the municipalities of Barcelona and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat):

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by memph

Bordeaux has 830,000 people in 453 square miles, giving it a density of 1,900 ppsm, comparable to Atlanta. However, of those 453 square miles, only about a third is the city and contiguous suburbs, the rest is a network of close together small towns and villages separated by rural land. Not sure how many others in France are like that, although I think the situation with Lyon is similar.

I made the calculations for Bordeaux within the beltway a few years ago (I added hundreds of census tracts for that; lots of work!). You can see the result in the satellite view below. The figure is a bit old now, but it gives an idea. 502,667 inhabitants (in 2007) within 49.5 sq miles, which means a population density of 10,154 inh. per sq mile (it's higher now, because Bordeaux is booming).

The 1,900 inh. per sq mile that you're quoting includes lots of distant suburbs beyond the beltway, but let's not forget that Bordeaux is surrounded by the huge Landes Forest, and the Landes Forest (part of which is included within the municipal territories of many suburbs of Bordeaux) artificially decreases the population density of the Bordeaux urban area.

The blue area corresponds to all the census tracts combined. A few census tracts encroach beyond the beltway, and a few census tracts don't go as far as the beltway, but most census tracts have their borders aligned exactly with the beltway. For an idea of dimensions, the brown river that flows through Bordeaux is TWICE the width of the Thames in London, and about the same width as the East River in NYC.





And this is the population density in the Medieval heart of Bordeaux (i.e. the part of Bordeaux that was already built-up in 1800). Back in 1800, Bordeaux had 90,000 inhabitants living in the blue area below, and it was one of the largest cities in Europe, with the same population as Barcelona and Hamburg, and slightly more populated than... NYC.

Land area: 2.38 km² / 0.92 mi²
Population: 41,670 inhabitants (in 2007), up from 36,511 in 1999
Population density: 17,539 inh. per km² / 45,426 inh. per mi² (in 2007)

[tech12]

edit: oops, i screwed up my numbers. Move along, nothing to see here!

[tdawg]

Toronto does not squeeze 6.3 million people into 833 sq miles. The entire GTA barely tops 6 million in 2,750 square miles. Where did you get those stats?

[memph]

Originally Posted by tdawg

Toronto does not squeeze 6.3 million people into 833 sq miles. The entire GTA barely tops 6 million in 2,750 square miles. Where did you get those stats?

The urban area is Toronto's urban area, plus Oshawa and Hamilton's. The 833 sq mile area does not include all the rural land inside the GTA (i.e. most of the GTA's land area). If Toronto was in the US, it's possible Oshawa and Hamilton would be included in the urban area (at least the people demographia think so).

[softee]

The urbanized portions of the Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa metro areas are contiguous, so it makes perfect sense to consider them to be a single urbanized area.

6.3 million in 883 square miles makes Toronto the densest urban area in Canada and the U.S.

[GreaterMontréal]

Originally Posted by softee

The urbanized portions of the Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa metro areas are contiguous, so it makes perfect sense to consider them to be a single urbanized area.

6.3 million in 883 square miles makes Toronto the densest urban area in Canada and the U.S.

well, NYC is 8.4M 27,550/sq mi

so they have 2M more people in an area ''half'' the size of the urban GTA. The first 883 square miles of urban NY will be denser than the GTA.

''With a census-estimated 2013 population of 8,405,837 distributed over a land area of just 305 square miles (790 km2)''

[unusualfire]

^ That is not true.

[dc_denizen]

I think of the big North American urban areas, LA and Toronto are the densest, followed by SF, followed by NYC, followed by Miami and Chicago.

The interesting question is how much population and sq miles could you chop off of New York's urban area to equate to LA or Toronto's density (7000/sq mile).

[GreaterMontréal]

Originally Posted by unusualfire

^ That is not true.

the first 883 square miles of urban NY will have more people than the 883 square miles of the GTA. NY is already bigger.

and it's not a city vs city thing. that's not the point.

[unusualfire]

Originally Posted by GreaterMontréal

the first 883 square miles of urban NY will have more people than the 883 square miles of the GTA. NY is already bigger.

and it's not a city vs city thing. that's not the point.

Are you comparing the city of NYC to another metro's urban area?