Like we have “largest city” lists,
- most people would think largest city means most populous,
- but some people interpret it as city area,
- so in the former case Mexico City would be the “Largest” city in North america
- in the latter case, LA would be (i haven’t fact checked these, just roll with it)
Some cities are really populous, like Hong Kong, and it means people settle for very little living space just to have access to the opportunities there. Cities grow big largely on the basis of this principle - how many people are willing to slum it in one place together? And historically, the rich have done the opposite; when peasants are cramming themselves into as small a space as possible, the rich are building homes larger than entire villages.
So, to contrast a city of commoners and a city of wealthy people, one effective metric would be to look at the average footage (floor area) of peoples’ homes. Ideally divided by how many people there are, to have it on a per person basis.
I bet the results would be interesting. We’d find loads of places we didn’t know the names of, little hideaway towns which serve as getaways for the wealthy
This can be a surprisingly difficult thing to measure, for a little surprising reason:
The city with most floor space per person is among the cities with the lowest population density. It will be a city where the maximum amount of homes are detached houses. And probably one where the “urban” planning is less dense than in your standard suburbia.
It will be a very small city by population.
And that leads us to the problem: how do we define “city”?
There are several competing definitions for what constitutes a city, and since we’re talking about cities at the very lowest end of the population scale, you’ll get a big pile of different answers depending on what counts as a city fir whom.
This was my immediate thought too: The city with the largest amount of floor space per person probably won’t qualify as a city on its own
Still valuable to me - it identifies money-flight, e.g are rich people in one town moving to a specific few suburbs instead of staying in the city centre?
We can do it on a per-neighbourhood basis and include things like villages
I still define those as cities, and that’s basically part of what I wanted to identify, actually: which cities are using their space in inefficient ways and are not building in a dense way?
That being said, I have no problem with suburbia if they create actual vibrant gardens instead of lawns (which they never seem to do).
But if you had a statistic you could show to city councils and real estate saying “this area (e.g manhattan) is drawing in more tax than your area because it has people living densely,” you could hopefully change their minds about things.
How about Pripyat? Abandoned city near cernobyl, so dividing by population gives NaN.
Fukushima is likely high up on the list too.
Outside of nuclear waste zones, I’d imagine factory towns where most of the work has become automated that also have an Amazon warehouse and a data center would be high up there too. So like, all of Ohio.Woah that sounds way more advanced than manufacturing in my country
That could be highest or lowest simultaneously, depending on how you look at it. Technically, NaN is the correct answer, so you can’t really apply this logic to any place with a zero population.
Population density would give you a good approximation and that list is already compiled.
Yes I guess so. So we should assume (at least in “1st world countries”) that lower pop. density means wealthier residents? Works for me, because in my country try the wealthiest people retreat to the countryside and coast, living in villages
not really, sitka AK is the biggest by area but has few enough houses/ few multistory buildings that it is almost certainly not the most floorspace per capita.
I think the trick with compiling such a metric is defining it, and it’s intended purpose. You’ve got one: compare the city of commoners to city of wealthy people. Or maybe a rich town locator.
With apartments, you get the sq. ft. of the dwelling, but there’s also common areas. None of it being owned by the residents, merely rented. Contrast that with farm land, you’d have relatively few people with high amount of “owned land”.
Sometimes very rich people choose to rent in ultra luxury apartments.
I wonder if part of the metric is something like, $ value of land / sq. ft. that is privately owned? Someone in Nebraska maybe owns 50 acres of land that is relatively low demand, versus say… a guy who owns a few golf courses in expensive areas.
Houston, TX immediately came to mind
They are wealthy in road space and parking space
You also have to take into account unhoused people. They have the most floor space of all.
This is true, and if the metric is intended to identify excess wealth of an overall town i would definitely include them in the equation - hypothetically might find that the city has like 100 square feet per person, but all the non rich sleep on the streets, so it becomes 5 square feet per person
Perth, WA is the longest city in the world and is only 2.5m people.
TIL! What an interesting place
It follows the coastline. Gets hilly and then hot and dry very quickly if you go east inland. Some of the suburbs would technically be towns of their own in other parts of the world but it’s all considered one city. Like Mandurah is considered Perth, but it’s over an hour drive on the freeway and a good chunk of the drive is undeveloped or national park.
kiruna claimed to be the largest city in the world up until 2009 due to the city limits being colocated with the municipality limits as a result of a typo in the paper work. it has a population of 22k and an area of almost 21k km2 (~8k sq mi).
My money is on Big Sky, Montana
That’s a good shout! I’d love to hear peoples suggestions for specific places
I would guess cities with declining populations would make it high up in the list.
