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The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

blog.plover.com

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Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#81

Post by jononor »

ewendel wrote: post #43
toxik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, neither Sweden’s nor Norway’s capital is in the map. But two smaller Norwegian cities are. I think this just teaches you the issue with discretization.

There are in fact five small Norwegian towns on this map. Vadsø, Hammerfest, Trondheim, Bergen and Longyearbyen.

Trondheim and Bergen rank 3 and 2 in Norway (after the capital, Oslo). Some 200k people live in each. Not so small by scandinavian standards.

But Vadsø, Hammerfest and Longyearbyen are tiny - population 2-12 thousand.

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#83

Post by mjd »

angleofrepose wrote: post #80

Unless I'm missing something, this map might be pretty or impressive that it can be made, but it is entirely meaningless. Meaningless in that I don't know of significant meaning of breaking down the globe into 10° chunks whatsoever. This doesn't tell you anything about the cities shown, nor the area in which those cities exist. There is zero meaning in this map because no meaning can be derived from the filter proces…

Not everything needs to have utility. Some things are just for fun. Utility is important, but fun is important too.

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#84

Post by autokad »

angleofrepose wrote: post #80

Unless I'm missing something, this map might be pretty or impressive that it can be made, but it is entirely meaningless. Meaningless in that I don't know of significant meaning of breaking down the globe into 10° chunks whatsoever. This doesn't tell you anything about the cities shown, nor the area in which those cities exist. There is zero meaning in this map because no meaning can be derived from the filter proces…

its an interesting problem. for the longest time, openstreetmap hid Philadelphia pretty much until you got down to the rooftop level and it annoyed the crap out of me. Its still not very good at what cities to show; Its a hard problem and I appreciate the article shining light on this issue.

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#85

Post by js2 »

bachmeier wrote: post #72
js2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just a few days ago, I learned Omaha is more populous than Miami.

Miami-Dade county, informally "Miami", has 2.7M people.

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#86

Post by mjd »

oefrha wrote: post #74

Spotted a factual mistake immediately: > There is a Chinese version of this. The Chinese cities on the map include the big Chinese cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Chengdu. Shenyang. A couple of cities in Mongolia, analogous to the appearance of Winnipeg on the U.S. map. Baotou and Hohhot are both Inner Mongolian cities, i.e. Chinese cities.

Thank you for pointing this out. I will correct it.

(edit: Fixed. Thanks again.)

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#89

Post by mjd »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #55

Pretty 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 o…

Yes, definitely. This sort of issue is very hard to resolve adequately. There's no definition that always does everything we want.

A while back I wrote an article comparing each U.S. state's largest and second-largest cities. (https://blog.plover.com/misc/second-largest-cities.html) I made a perfectly reasonable choice of which definition to adopt, but it still had major peculiarities: the largest city in New Jersey was Trenton, not Newark, because in the data set I used, Newark was considered part of New York City.

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#90

Post by oefrha »

mjd wrote: post #86
oefrha wrote: post #74

Spotted a factual mistake immediately: > There is a Chinese version of this. The Chinese cities on the map include the big Chinese cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Chengdu. Shenyang. A couple of cities in Mongolia, analogous to the appearance of Winnipeg on the U.S. map. Baotou and Hohhot are both Inner Mongolian cities, i.e. Chinese cities.

Thank you for pointing this out. I will correct it. (edit: Fixed. Thanks again.)

No problem!
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