For those who liked this, I frequently come back to this visual which displays the distribution within a city in an arguably more visually appealing format:
Love this!
Fyi I noticed Kaohsiung was listed incorrectly as Kaohsiung (China) instead of Kaohsiung (Taiwan). Strange as Taipei was listed correctly as Taipei (Taiwan).
I'd say that density is generally a good thing, IMO. The more people live in a place, generally access to things is more convenient, commutes are shorter, etc. Low density generally means sprawl.
Higher density cities are the ecologically least damaging mode of housing and provide more of what makes cities great: more people doing interesting things, more opportunities for interactions, education, access to health care, etc.
Now there are plenty of people who don't want that, but then they don't want to be in an urban environment at all. So I'm not saying it's winning for every person. But on a continuum from ultra-rural to ultra dense I think a graph of "quality of life for residents-by-choice" would be a saddle curve. Less dense cities, and most suburbs (by the US definition) are neither fish nor fowl.
This is really great. I want to review this for everywhere I've been, because the variation in how gov'ts do statistics is hiding so much of what's actually going on there.
It’s really helpful to have such a visualisation tool. I’ve felt Mumbai as being quite dense (partially because of the sea around it), and throwing a few “most dense cities” like Dhaka/Manila/Tokyo/Jakarta so far still results in Mumbai having the highest cumulative density values (made much more explicit when excluding large water bodies).
Question/challenge: can anyone find any other city with a greater density? Dhaka is close but has a lower peak and tapers off faster.
The reason HK is not more dense in general is because much of the TAR is unlivable water and mountains that have to be worked around (lots of bridges and tunnels). Once you just count people on livable land, its density shoots up. It isn’t like other cities where density ever tapers off, it’s just clumps of apartment skyscrapers here and there.
Note that the default graph is 'weighted density', to show you "how dense an area feels for the typical person who lives there." I didn't see where it says how it's calculated.
You can change it to other measurements, including straight density.
I love this project, but I find some of the UI decisions baffling.
For instance, as I add cities to my comparison, the colors of the cities I already have in the chart keep changing. Did anyone bother testing it, because that led to some serious confusion?
Readit News
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/2/7480993/population-density-visu...
It helps explain the low-density feel that a city like London has compared to most large non-European cities.
The original source is the third panel here: https://issuu.com/lsecities/docs/hongkong2011newspaper/9
I don't think this takes into account water around cities. For NYC harbour south of downtown pull us down?
Higher density cities are the ecologically least damaging mode of housing and provide more of what makes cities great: more people doing interesting things, more opportunities for interactions, education, access to health care, etc.
Now there are plenty of people who don't want that, but then they don't want to be in an urban environment at all. So I'm not saying it's winning for every person. But on a continuum from ultra-rural to ultra dense I think a graph of "quality of life for residents-by-choice" would be a saddle curve. Less dense cities, and most suburbs (by the US definition) are neither fish nor fowl.
Question/challenge: can anyone find any other city with a greater density? Dhaka is close but has a lower peak and tapers off faster.
You can change it to other measurements, including straight density.
For instance, as I add cities to my comparison, the colors of the cities I already have in the chart keep changing. Did anyone bother testing it, because that led to some serious confusion?