How does your city define its neighborhoods/districts?

[Docere]

I think the 59 community districts are the main local unit for statistical collection.

I guess Manhattan can be characterized as having larger districts and smaller subsections/neighborhoods within: Carnegie Hill and Yorkville within the Upper East Side, East Village and Bowery within the Lower East Side etc.

This Wikipedia map is quite detailed, so it picks up very niche commercial areas like the Diamond District as well.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Docere

This Wikipedia map is quite detailed, so it picks up very niche commercial areas like the Diamond District as well.

Ironically, it doesn't list the much more well known Theater District. The Diamond District is pretty obscure and even people who know about it mostly think of it as just the block in Midtown with all the diamond shops.

[Docere]

This is probably an impossible or unanswerable question but what's the right size for a neighborhood (population, land area etc.) From my own vantage point it seems like 0.5-1.5 square miles (or up to 3-4 sq km) seems about right in dense urban areas. Beyond that you're probably beyond your own "extended backyard."

[Docere]

A list and maps of NYC neighborhoods:

https://whttps://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/population-geography/neighborhoods.htm

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/population-geography/maps-boroughs.htm

[New Brisavoine]

Paris about to get a new layout. This is the merger of Paris proposed last week by the national administration in charge of planning. Expending Paris to include all the inner suburbs (but not the outer suburbs), and merging the current 20 arrondissements and more than 120 inner suburban municipalities to create 40 districts, in charge of local policies (streets, parks, etc). The new districts wouldn't get numbers, like the current arrondissements, but names like the London boroughs.

[Docere]

As a kid I remember being stunned reading in an atlas that Paris (proper but I didn't understand the distinction) "only" had 2 million people while London and NYC were much much larger 7 million. I have a childhood memory of striking out the "2" and replacing it with 10 lol (surely they're mistaken!)

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Paris about to get a new layout. This is the merger of Paris proposed last week by the national administration in charge of planning. Expending Paris to include all the inner suburbs (but not the outer suburbs), and merging the current 20 arrondissements and more than 120 inner suburban municipalities to create 40 districts, in charge of local policies (streets, parks, etc). The new districts wouldn't get numbers, like the current arrondissements, but names like the London boroughs.

About what would be the population of the expanded Paris?

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

About what would be the population of the expanded Paris?

The population within these borders is 6.9 million people, but I think when the next president (presidential election in May 2027) finally tackles the issue, it's impossible that they limit Paris to such a restricted territory. The current Greater Paris Metropolis (a quasi-aborted metropolitan authority, very unlike the Greater London Authority, because the petty members of parliament emptied it of almost all its powers when it was created in 2015) is larger than this territory. It includes some large suburbs like Argenteuil (106,000 people live in the city of Argenteuil), and I can't see how they could say to Argenteuil and other municipalities outside of this area "sorry guys, you were part of the Greater Paris Metropolis, but now we evict you from the new city of Greater Paris". What would they do with Argenteuil?

The current Greater Paris Metropolis has 7.15 million inhabitants, as opposed to 6.9 million in the territory mooted here for the new city of Greater Paris.

So most likely, the issue of where to set the border will be hotly debated. Even the Greater Paris Metropolis is quite small compared to the real extent of Paris. It doesn't even include Versailles, Enghien, Montmorency, or St Germain en Laye (the "St Germain" in Paris St Germain, PSG, of Europe's Champions League fame).

But in any case, this is the first time since 1860 that an official public body from the French central state dares to say officially that Paris should be enlarged, and even goes as far as to propose a tentative map, with tentative city districts and their tentative names. As Le Monde (French daily) reported, this idea of enlarging Paris was often mentioned privately in the corridors of ministries, but until last week no one had ever dared to publicly say it, so strong was the repulsion of the suburban annexations by Napoleon III in 1860 (the French Republic was built largely in opposition and as a rejection of the 2nd Empire).

Unsurprisingly, various mayors from suburban municipalities have already jumped to the barricades and loudly rejected this enlargement project, calling it "destructive of freedom and municipal liberties".