TIL Atlanta, GA has fewer people than Jacksonville, FL. The Atlanta metropolitan area has a lot more people.
Yeah I looked at the map and was dumbfounded. Jacksonville? It's not even half the size of the Atlanta metro area population!
The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
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Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#52TIL Atlanta, GA has fewer people than Jacksonville, FL. The Atlanta metropolitan area has a lot more people.
This is the problem with how we define cities. Jacksonville is technically the largest city in all of Florida too, but that is because it annexed almost all of its suburbs, so the whole "metro" area is just on city, which is quite different then most other American cities.
Right. Havana is more populous than Miami because it includes 15 municipalities, covering 728 km2. Miami is just Miami proper, which is 145 km2. But the Miami urban area is 2900 km2, and has 5.5M people which would be larger than Havana (2.1M people).
Miami is much denser than Havana (4,299.7/km2 vs 2,892.0/km2).
But that's besides the point I guess. Every map maker makes arbitrary choices. And it made me curious why some cities and not others.
Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#53What would be awesome is if you can take a grid like this and then drag it to create an offset and change in subtle ways what cities appear in the boxes.
This could be the beginning of something like a gerrymandering tool.
Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#54TIL Atlanta, GA has fewer people than Jacksonville, FL. The Atlanta metropolitan area has a lot more people.
This is the problem with how we define cities. Jacksonville is technically the largest city in all of Florida too, but that is because it annexed almost all of its suburbs, so the whole "metro" area is just on city, which is quite different then most other American cities.
This is also why Phoenix appears as one of the US's largest cities, while its metro area is significantly smaller than other cities that have a smaller population.
Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#55Pretty interesting, but it suffers from a common flaw for this type of analysis - it counts the population that lives within the municipal boundaries of the city itself, not the population that lives within the "urban area" or commuting zone of that city. Different regions have different norms and laws for how they define municipal boundaries, so in some places the main municipality (e.g. Boston) is just a fraction of the urban core, while in other places the municipal boundaries include huge amounts of suburban and even rural land. Unless you're specifically interested in analyzing something related to municipal government, this isn't normally what you want to use to compare across regions.
Jacksonville, FL is an extreme example of this. Jacksonville's municipal boundaries are huge - it covers 875 sq. miles[1]. This is ~1.85x the area of New York City[2], and 3.77x the area of San Francisco[3].
Within the US, it's preferable to use core-based statistical areas (CBSAs)[4] for this type of analysis. They're defined by commuting zones, and they're not sensitive to political boundaries except to the extent that political boundaries actually affect commuting patterns. If you want to limit yourself to the "dense" part of the metro area then you can use the Census-defined Urbanized Areas[5], but the definitions of those might not match your intuitions about what should be included.
Assuming we use CBSA population, then the box that contains Jacksonville should instead have Atlanta, which has an CBSA population of ~5.8 million vs. only ~1.5 million in Jacksonville[5].
The statistical agencies for other countries have similar concepts. For Europe, Eurostat defines metropolitan regions[6], which have a similar definition. The OECD also maintains a data set of population by metropolitan area for OECD countries, although the methodology isn't consistent across all countries in that data set[7].
TL;DR - political and municipal boundaries aren't comparable across regions, use commuting zones or density-based region definitions instead. If you see Jacksonville, FL in a list of "biggest cities", it's always a red flag that they're using municipal boundaries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville,_Florida
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_city
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core-based_statistical_area
[5] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
[5] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=United%20States&tid=A...
[6] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/metropolitan-regions/data/...
Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me that’s not misleading in that they count city proper rather than metro areas. Both have their places, but I wouldn’t say one is more misleading than the other. One is administrative and one is more demographic.
And they both go to show that statements/calculations about things like urban density are heavily influenced by historically and culturally determined political boundaries and definitions. Even look at the US Census Bureau 80% urban metric that a lot of people like to quote. Lots of small towns with farmlands and orchards (like where I live) are "urban" by this particular definition. And they are "urban" relative to…
I agree with that. Lumping rural hamlets into urban definitions kind of muddies things.
Urban, town, rural/agricultural, wilderness would add a bit more granularity and would give more conceptual fidelity.
Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#57I wonder if London could be the largest city in two boxes. The zero meridian line goes through Greenwich, which leaves most of London in the western box, but a still sizeable chunk of East London in the eastern box. Is East London bigger than Hamburg? Are there any other large cities that straddle the bounding boxes?
Brussels (c.1.2m) and Cologne (c.1.1m) are both in that box, I believe.
It seems the population of the parts of Greater London east of the Meridian is something around one million[1] so it would be close.
Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chicago is having significant population loss, so that gap will only grow. I believe Houston is about to pass Chicago.
Why is Chicago losing people?
Many reasons, but probably the biggest one is social shifts causing an overall degradation of city life resulting in people leaving. When the Chicago Board of Trade ended floor trading a significant amount of large finance companies moved elsewhere, some relocated to Dallas, some reduced staffing/office space and had principle officers in NYC already.
There's a lot of conversations about cities in the Midwest simply not happening, even though critical decay is occurring. St. Louis is another example of a city where they were doing very well for awhile and had a strong aerospace/telecom/manufacturing/tech sector and the city has now decayed dramatically to the point many businesses have pulled out and crime rates have skyrocketed. St Louis and Chicago are both more dangerous cities than Detroit, and all the available evidence points to violence being primarily a socioeconomic issue rather than an issue of any other factors.
Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#59I love how this says something about the biases that exist in making legible maps. Toronto isn’t even shown. Any time to read a map, remember that at different scales, there’s an editorial opinion, whether direct or algorithmic, on what you see.
Isn't that the point of the map (show the most populous city in each box?) Or you didn't get what the map is trying to do?
I suspect the point is that decisions are made whenever a map is constructed, and those decisions can produce wildly different views of the world.
While some of those decisions are in some sense objective (e.g. the equator being 0 degrees latitude), others are purely arbitrary or historical (e.g. the definition of 0 degrees longitude). If that meridian had a different definition, the results would be quite different. Then there are decisions made by a particular map maker. As others have noted, small town and research stations at far northern and southern latitudes have disproportionate representation simply because the parameters (10 degrees of arc in latitude and longitude) divide a smaller area of the globe into the same number of bins as the much larger area of the globe at equatorial latitudes.
This map is far more interesting in terms of what it tells us about intrinsic biases in mapping than in terms of what it tells us about the world.
Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box
#60I quibble with the description of the shapes bounded by 10 degrees of longitude and latitude as "rectangles" - they're not even planar shapes, and their adjacent sides certainly aren't at right angles. Some of them don't even have four sides. This bears considering when looking at the map, because some of those regions are much, much smaller than others.
Since you want to quibble, I'll just point out that the word “rectangles” does not appear in the article.