Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
chicagoland, in terms of where the people live, is nowhere remotely close to 12,000 sq., miles in size.
sure, the CB's wacky-ass CSA definition now includes so many rural cornfield counties that it technically includes over 10,600 sq. miles, but that's an utterly absurd amount of land to consider as "chicagoland", with roughly 3/4 of of it literally cornfields.
i mean, how much time have you ever spent in jasper, or newton, or kankakee, or dekalb, or grundy, or putnam, or lasalle, or bureau counties? they're all straight-up cornbelt with a relative handful of super-commuters that allow them to barely jump the threshold for inclusion into the MSA/CSA.
for a realistic picture for how big chicagoland actually is in terms of physical size, the UA definition is billions of times more accurate.
now, because the CB still hasn't released 2020 UA figures, we have to go back to 2010, but because chicagoland is such a slow-growing area, these figures are still good enough for our purposes here.
Chicago UA: 8,608,208 people on 2,442.8 sq. miles of land
Round Lake UA: 290,373 people on 152.6 sq. miles of land
Combined: 8,898,581 people on 2,595.4 sq. miles of land
now, some might argue that the kenosha UA should be added in there too, as it directly abuts the chicago UA and has metra service into downtown, but i don't like including anything north of the cheddar curtain.
for those who insist, here's kenosha. it doesn't move the numbers a great deal.
Kenosha UA: 124,064 people on 51.2 sq. miles of land.
so in rough terms, we can say that chicagoland is a city of 9M people on 2,600 sq. miles of land. all of those other thousands and thousands of sq. miles in the MSA/CSA definitions are primarily just cornfields surrounding the urban area.
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I made a "tailored Chicago metro area" on the other thread that Steely didn't care so much:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yuri
That's for Steely who doesn't like Chicago MSA and its cornfields:
---------------------- 2020 -------- 2010 -------- 2000 -------- 1990 --------- Area --------------- Growth % ---------- Density
CHICAGO --------- 8,977,679 --- 8,835,910 --- 8,568,905 --- 7,727,231 ---- 8,590 km² ---- 1.6% ---- 3.1% --- 10.9% ---- 1,045.1 inh./km²
- Chicago is the whole Cook, Du Page and Lake, IL counties. For the others, I used census "minor civil divisions" as units: Kane without the 1/3 western part (minus 5 divisions), Kendall with only 2 divisions (basically Oswego), McHenry without the western half (minus 9 divisions), Will without the 1/3 southern part (minus 9 divisions), Lake, IN without the 1/3 southern part (minus 3 divisions) and Porter with only 1 division (basically Portage). You can see the maps on citypopulation.de
That's 3,300 sq mi for a 2,700 inh/sq mi density. It's very close to Chicago's urban area. It's a 9 million people city.
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9 million people in 8,600 km2 as opposed to 7.7 million in 10,100 km2 in "the core Golden Horseshoe" mentioned by softee above.
And we should keep in mind US urban areas are much less dense than Canadians, so it's only natural that they take more space.
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