The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by OldHand2018 » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

hellofunk wrote: post #46

griffinkelly wrote: post #40

Earlier 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?

Chicago used to have extremely high industrial employment, so the general downward trend across the United States was amplified in Chicago. The population peaked in the late 1950s and has been dropping since, although the rate of decrease has been dropping as Chicago has transitioned to a very diversified economy. The north side of the city is now very stable population-wise and the downtown area has seen incredible growth (in the last 3 censuses, Chicago has seen higher downtown population growth than any other city in the US), while the south and west sides continue to struggle. These are the areas that were the most industrial.

Houston has seen tremendous growth primarily through annexation. It is now more than 3 times the geographical size of Chicago. But annexation of residential land in Texas is now far more difficult, so the geographic size growth of Houston has dramatically slowed [1]. Once all the undeveloped land is used, Houston will have to rely on densifying for population growth. Current restrictions make it unlikely to ever be as dense as NYC, Chicago or LA, but with its massive size it wouldn't need to be to attain 5 or 6 million residents. On the other hand, it is already facing growth challenges that may reduce the carrying capacity of the city [2].

I'd guess that Houston surpasses Chicago in population within 15 or 20 years, but it remains to be seen if that is going to be permanent or not.

[1] https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Annexation/docs_pdfs/Hous...

[2] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/transportation/article...

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

#162

Post by jobigoud » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

wcarey wrote: post #75

caf wrote: post #25

I 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.

A fun thought experiment is to noodle through whether, given the method of choosing cities described, the choice of map projection would influence the resulting list of cities.

Even the exact same projection but a slightly shifted 0° meridien would yield a completely different list of cities.

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

#163

Post by jobigoud » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #144

allengeorge wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OP got confused - as I did - on the position of Toronto on the lakes. We both didn’t realize that Toronto is in the same box as New York.

I’m not confused. That’s my point. That Toronto is a big city and the rules defining how this map gets symbolized makes it invisible.

It's like saying Pluto is a big planet. It may be true but there is a bigger one nearby that make it invisible if your map is about the biggest in the neighborhood.

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

#164

Post by hammock » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 1:53 AM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #151

hammock wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point. What is an equal-area, tessellated shape that could be used in its place? I guess a triangle. Or one of these: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Sp... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/Sp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_polyhedron For just shapes the above is a nice visual start. However a striking feature of the linked article is how frequently there's a major city right near a cell edge. A more useful list might be constructed by some process involving assigning a "city" an imprint size based on population, and a surrounding 'metro area' based on absorbing any weaker cities that overlap until…

Yeah I was hoping there was a shape more interesting than a triangle (or a soccer ball)... Those rounded squares and rounded triangles were the best I could find.

I like that idea of building the regions bottom-up.