Worldwide Demographics

[nito]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

There was a documentary about Hong Kong on TV tonight, so I was curious how many people lived in the same small territory as Hong Kong in Paris, and then I also looked for Madrid and Barcelona. Here are the results.

Population in 2023 (land area):
- Hong Kong: 7,498,100 (1,114.4 km²)
- Paris: 8,428,800 (1,115.9 km²)
- Madrid: 5,129,600 (1,113.0 km²)
- Barcelona: 4,382,400 (1,112.2 km²)

As Muppet notes, most of Hong Kong isn’t developed. Hong Kong is incredibly hilly, with some points nearing up to 1,000m in height, so the population is concentrated along narrow coastal plains (with some land reclamation) and valley corridors. Most of the territory is a mixture of forest lined hills, uninhabited islands and agricultural land.

In theory you could urbanise the entire territory, but that is about as likely as reclaiming the entirety of the Upper Bay of New York.

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

Does that urban figure include the old villages on the islands and countryside? Either way, that would put Hong Kong's residential density around 42,000/sqkm (excluding the airport). Which looks & sounds like it'd be about right, especially considering that some neighbourhoods are north of 100,000/sqkm. Of course, also wouldn't be entirely fair to exclude airports, parks, and ports from Hong Kong and not from other cities.

The total developed land area in Hong Kong is 268km², or 24.1% of the entire land area. That includes every single building and structure, roads, railways, airports, utilities, open space, cemeteries, vacant land, etc… Source: From 2015, but I can’t imagine the numbers have changed much outside some minor reclamation: https://www.cedd.gov.hk/filemanager/eng/content_954/Info_Sheet2.pdf

774km² (69.7%) of Hong Kong is woodland, shrubland, grassland, reservoirs and other barren land. Another 68km² (6.1%) is agricultural land.

You can pretty much fit all of the developed residential (including the rural settlements), commercial and industrial space of Hong Kong into the 105km² of the City of Paris. Hong Kong of course has 7.5mn people and Paris 2mn.


It does ask the question, what is and isn’t part of a city to be counted? A lot of people reference just the land area, but is protected undeveloped forest or agricultural land any less or more of a part of a city than a body of water? Hong Kong is probably the most extreme example of this because of the geographical constraints on development, but other cities such as London have swathes of protected undeveloped land that are of statistical significance.

Originally Posted by iheartthed

New York puts up those London and Paris numbers in half the land area:
- New York City (2020): 8,804,190 (778.18 km²)
edit:
- NYC + Essex, Hudson, and Union in NJ: 10,968,117 (1,491 km²)

The area doesn’t exactly match, but going by your figures and Brisavoine, New York has experienced population loss of some 350,000?

I’m also surprised that London’s population is expanding (numerical and percentage terms) so much faster than Paris. Is French population growth mostly outside of Paris?