Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
do you honestly think there are 5.4M people in LA living in contiguous pre-war fabric?
i would say that figure is "super far-off".
besides, liat91 wasn't trying to measure contiguous pre-war fabric anyway, otherwise he would have had to include evanston (and many other burbs) in chicago's figure (which he didn't).
it's why his whole exercise is fairly meaningless, IMO. all he's given us for his criteria is that he goes by "feel" from driving around various cities and looking at maps and making vague value judgement about whether or not a given place seems "bulgy".
i'm sorry, but that is not a sound basis for a system of making objective, apples-to-apples comparisons of the relative sizes of US cities while disregarding municipal boundaries.
from what he's given us thus far regarding his criteria, not in the slightest.
it's all "feel" and vague, extremely subjective value judgements about what to include/exclude.
and apparently he changes up his opinions about what to include from city to city, so we're not getting anything close to apples-to-apples here.
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One of the big reasons this exercise cannot be relegated to concrete criteria is the marked difference in how cities are structured around this country. I used different measures for each city, but also used a basic nationwide criteria based on a perceived average.
Chicago is sprawled, prewar streetcar, old school urban and new school urban all at once. One of the reasons why I didn't have to take or add from it much. LA on the other hand is a weird mix of jumbled boundaries, some prewar, sunbelt sprawl along with multinodal layout. Driving into the city in LA is much different than doing so in Chicago, New York or Atlanta, thought there are a few commonalities; hence the nationwide criteria.
Evanston is bigger than OP and has urban qualities, but it isn't on par in being as interwoven with Chicago. It could be included in Chicago if you only cared about proximity and having urban qualities. I would add Lincolnwood to Chicago, before Evanston.
Miami was another tough one for me. Having lived there, I can tell you that even though one could consider North Miami Beach as part of Miami, relatively speaking, it is a close in suburb rather than an extension of the city. Miami Shores being in between helped me make that distinction. Miami Beach, Coral Gables etc, are easily an extension.
There can be no ironclad objective criteria you could use for all the cities I listed. It's not possible and would result in wild variations of city boundaries.
Especially when considering blind borderless sprawl emanating from some of these cities.