Why didn't the Australian major cities sprawl quite the same way that US cities do?

[nameless dude]

Australian cities on average aren't much denser than American if at all. Look at Perth for example, it sprawls like a Miami for the population. All the major Aus cities have healthy and active downtowns though.

But with Melbourne and Sydney perhaps there's a case that the way the suburbs are built are somewhat different. Syd and Melb have large and old suburban rail networks that allowed development to focus along the rail corridors. As a result there's a particular pattern you can see around the suburbs of Syd and Melb:

Suburban commercial development is concentrated heavily around railway stations. For example take a look at this suburb in Sydney:
https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.791...!1e3?entry=ttu

You can see the low density housing all around the area, but right in the middle there's a large concentration of shops and some office buildings, anchored by a train station within it, and that serves as the hub for the suburb. If you go into street view you'll see it's a very tight and walkable space with a pedestrian mall in the middle.

And this pattern of development is typical for a large part of suburban Sydney and Melbourne - low density SFH suburbs, anchored by some sort of town centre with a train station in the middle. In the case of Sydney there was also a push to locate suburban shopping malls within those town centres. So most of the major malls there are integrated into those areas with active street frontages, as opposed to being segregated from its environment like how you might picture a typical suburban mall.

So if you take a closer look around the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, you'll find a lot less of those gigantic parking lots eating up acres of space than you might expect. (Especially Sydney where the large scale parking lot, strip mall format almost doesn't exist until you reach the outer suburbs)

This pattern doesn't exist that much outside of Sydney and Melbourne though. Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide are mostly "strip mall, big box" suburbs.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by craigs

I am genuinely curious if the Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas are "considerably denser than US equivalents."

Wikipedia has the Sydney metropolitan area with 5,297,089 residents within 4,775.2 square miles. That is a population density of 1,120 persons per square mile. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has the Melbourne metropolitan area with 5,031,195 residents within 3,858.3 square miles. That is a population density of 1,304 persons per square mile.

So for comparison's sake, what are the "US equivalents" to the two most populous metropolitan areas in Australia? The two most populous metropolitan areas in the US?

Detroit's metro area is in a similar population range (4.3m) and is about the same density (1,123 ppsm).

[Yuri]

And Detroit urban area (including Ann Arbor and South Lyon) got 4,240,542 people within 4,009 km².

Sydney urban area 4,698,656 people in 2,194 km² and Melbourne 4,585,537 in 2,881 km².

Those are numbers from their respective census. It's obviously US cities sprawl way more. Sydney is twice as dense as Detroit. You can tell just by looking at them.

[bartolo]

Originally Posted by Yuri

And Detroit urban area (including Ann Arbor and South Lyon) got 4,240,542 people within 4,009 km².

Sydney urban area 4,698,656 people in 2,194 km² and Melbourne 4,585,537 in 2,881 km².

Those are numbers from their respective census. It's obviously US cities sprawl way more. Sydney is twice as dense as Detroit. You can tell just by looking at them.

I think everyone is comparing metro densities rather than urban densities.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Yuri

And Detroit urban area (including Ann Arbor and South Lyon) got 4,240,542 people within 4,009 km².

Sydney urban area 4,698,656 people in 2,194 km² and Melbourne 4,585,537 in 2,881 km².

Those are numbers from their respective census. It's obviously US cities sprawl way more. Sydney is twice as dense as Detroit. You can tell just by looking at them.

Those don't seem like extraordinarily dense urban areas from the U.S. perspective. Pulling the US urban area definition from wikipedia:

1. Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim, CA: 2,886.6 ppl per km sq
2. New York–Jersey City–Newark, NY–NJ: 2,309.2 ppl per km sq
3. Sydney, AUS: 2,141.6 ppl per km sq
4. Miami–Fort Lauderdale, FL: 1,886. ppl per km sq
5. Melbourne, AUS: 1,591.6 ppl per km sq
6. Washington–Arlington, DC–VA–MD: 1,543.4 ppl per km sq
7. Chicago, IL–IN: 1,432.1 ppl per km sq
8. Phoenix–Mesa–Scottsdale, AZ: 1,382.5 ppl per km sq
9. Houston, TX: 1,289.5 ppl per km sq
10. Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington, TX: 1,267. ppl per km sq
11. Philadelphia, PA–NJ–DE–MD: 1,158.6 ppl per km sq
12. Detroit, MI: 1,135. ppl per km sq
13. Boston, MA–NH: 1,021.8 ppl per km sq
14. Atlanta, GA: 771.3 ppl per km sq

Sydney and Melbourne do skew on the denser side compared to US urban areas, but they don't seem that dense from the high-level. I've never been to Australia, but just poking around on streetview it looks like L.A. style density, with a lot of contiguous, medium density, single-family housing neighborhoods. And even though the average density is close to NY, people in NY metro clearly live in a far more densely built setting.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by bartolo

I think everyone is comparing metro densities rather than urban densities.

Which doesn’t make sense as metro areas follow administrative borders. Los Angeles metro area for instance borders Nevada.

[tayser]

The last time a thread on here started talking about Australian population you all seem to ignore the nuance we were discussing.

The metropolitan populations of Australian cities are known as Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSAs) and they include vast amounts of rural land.



Blue line is the GCCSA boundary for Melbourne.

Sydney's GCCSA has vast amounts of national park included in it.



Thanks to the hi-res and outlook vbulletin system still running here, you can see where the built up areas are compared to the GCCSA boundary (blue).

read: https://blog.id.com.au/2023/populati...-largest-city/

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Those don't seem like extraordinarily dense urban areas from the U.S. perspective. Pulling the US urban area definition from wikipedia:

1. Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim, CA: 2,886.6 ppl per km sq
2. New York–Jersey City–Newark, NY–NJ: 2,309.2 ppl per km sq
3. Sydney, AUS: 2,141.6 ppl per km sq
4. Miami–Fort Lauderdale, FL: 1,886. ppl per km sq
5. Melbourne, AUS: 1,591.6 ppl per km sq
6. Washington–Arlington, DC–VA–MD: 1,543.4 ppl per km sq
7. Chicago, IL–IN: 1,432.1 ppl per km sq
8. Phoenix–Mesa–Scottsdale, AZ: 1,382.5 ppl per km sq
9. Houston, TX: 1,289.5 ppl per km sq
10. Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington, TX: 1,267. ppl per km sq
11. Philadelphia, PA–NJ–DE–MD: 1,158.6 ppl per km sq
12. Detroit, MI: 1,135. ppl per km sq
13. Boston, MA–NH: 1,021.8 ppl per km sq
14. Atlanta, GA: 771.3 ppl per km sq

Sydney and Melbourne do skew on the denser side compared to US urban areas, but they don't seem that dense from the high-level. I've never been to Australia, but just poking around on streetview it looks like L.A. style density, with a lot of contiguous, medium density, single-family housing neighborhoods. And even though the average density is close to NY, people in NY metro clearly live in a far more densely built setting.

They’re right on the top amongst US densest. Your comparison with LA is valid, but LA is an outlier with suburbs like 6x denser than the ones east of Mississippi.

And here we’re not arguing Australian cities are urban, on contrary, they’re very suburban and even compared to them, a low bar, the US urban areas are not dense.

[JManc]

New York and LA are megacities and thus tend to be an outlier even within their own countries. There's nothing else comparable here to New York and LA just like there's nothing comparable in the UK to London, Paris in France, Moscow in Russia and so on...

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Yuri

They’re right on the top amongst US densest. Your comparison with LA is valid, but LA is an outlier with suburbs like 6x denser than the ones east of Mississippi.

And here we’re not arguing Australian cities are urban, on contrary, they’re very suburban and even compared to them, a low bar, the US urban areas are not dense.

Well keep in mind that the nature of depopulated city centers in the eastern United States will bring down the density numbers for many U.S. urban areas. The built form of Sydney looks pretty typical for a medium-large North American city, IMO, but it doesn't have the depopulation problem that places like Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, etc., are still battling, and places on the east coast are recovering from. All else the same, if the city of Detroit was still around its peak population then the urban area density would be around 1,500 pp square km, or roughly the same as Melbourne.

[nameless dude]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Sydney urban area 4,698,656 people in 2,194 km² and Melbourne 4,585,537 in 2,881 km².

Those figures seem to be from the Australian statistic's "urban centres and localities" (UCL). If you look at the boundaries for those and want to bw nitpicky there's still several hundred km2 of unpopulated land. Point is there's no precise apples-apples comparison for figures because each country has its own set of standards.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by JManc

New York and LA are megacities and thus tend to be an outlier even within their own countries. There's nothing else comparable here to New York and LA just like there's nothing comparable in the UK to London, Paris in France, Moscow in Russia and so on...

I think you make my point for me. Sydney and Melbourne are not merely random provincial capitals--they are by far Australia's two most populous metropolitan areas. As that nation's version of "megacities" both are outliers within Australia. The other metropolitan areas in Australia are not comparable to Sydney and Melbourne.

[edale]

Originally Posted by tayser

The last time a thread on here started talking about Australian population you all seem to ignore the nuance we were discussing.

The metropolitan populations of Australian cities are known as Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSAs) and they include vast amounts of rural land.

Yes, but the same happens with many/most American metro areas, too. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and Combined Statistical Areas (CSAs) are calculated at the county level. Los Angeles County, for example, includes a large amount of mountains and deserts where few people live. Neighboring Riverside County goes all the way to the Arizona border, and San Bernardino County goes all the way to Nevada! All three of those counties are in the LA CSA. It doesn't seem too dissimilar to the way things are calculated for Australian cities, so I think the metro area density comparisons are appropriate.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by nameless dude

Those figures seem to be from the Australian statistic's "urban centres and localities" (UCL). If you look at the boundaries for those and want to bw nitpicky there's still several hundred km2 of unpopulated land. Point is there's no precise apples-apples comparison for figures because each country has its own set of standards.

On other words, they’re actually even denser making the US urban areas even less dense in comparison.

[Klippenstein]

Originally Posted by Yuri

On other words, they’re actually even denser making the US urban areas even less dense in comparison.

Of course, all parts of the less dense US urban areas are completely populated. Makes sense. Because only Australian urban areas includes unpopulated land. This is a completely logic train of thought.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by craigs

I think you make my point for me. Sydney and Melbourne are not merely random provincial capitals--they are by far Australia's two most populous metropolitan areas. As that nation's version of "megacities" both are outliers within Australia. The other metropolitan areas in Australia are not comparable to Sydney and Melbourne.

Megacities aren't exceptional because they're the largest cities in a particular country. They're exceptional mainly because they're exceptionally large. I keep seeing people assigning inappropriate importance to the relative population position within a particular country when this isn't a causal factor for most things. Yes there are some things like the distribution of government institutions or corporate offices that are affected by a city's position within a country. But most things like suburban sprawl, transit usage, etc. really aren't. Those things are mostly based on the actual size along with the local geographic, regulatory, and economic conditions. Things being "versions" of megacities when they're nowhere near that size just isn't a thing.

[craigs]

So let me get this straight: we're going to compare the population densities of the two most populous metropolitan areas in Australia with the two most populous metropolitan areas in the United States, right?

Oh--wait! No! That wouldn't produce the outcome that we have already decided that we want to see.

So . . . we'll have to come up with some random reason to substitute less populous US cities, cities that are chosen for being less dense to keep us on track to our pre-ordained goal. We'll invent a reason to cherry-pick cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, to that end.

Got it.

[nameless dude]

Originally Posted by Yuri

On other words, they’re actually even denser making the US urban areas even less dense in comparison.

Originally Posted by edale

Yes, but the same happens with many/most American metro areas, too. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and Combined Statistical Areas (CSAs) are calculated at the county level. Los Angeles County, for example, includes a large amount of mountains and deserts where few people live. Neighboring Riverside County goes all the way to the Arizona border, and San Bernardino County goes all the way to Nevada! All three of those counties are in the LA CSA. It doesn't seem too dissimilar to the way things are calculated for Australian cities, so I think the metro area density comparisons are appropriate.

The problem is how much of the land in the Aus or US metro is unpopulated. Is it 10%, 50% or 80%.

Structurally Aus cities have more in common with US cities than European or Asian. With perhaps the difference I described in my first post for Syd and Melb. I get that walkable railway hub concept exists in the US too like parts of the Bay area or Chicagoland, but it doesn't seem to be to the prevalence or intensity of suburban Melb and Syd.

And gigantic surface parking lots are much less of a thing in suburban Melb and Syd, especially Syd where you'd be hard pressed to find any football field sized parking until you hit the outer burbs. (They're all either underground or tucked away behind)

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Megacities aren't exceptional because they're the largest cities in a particular country. They're exceptional mainly because they're exceptionally large. I keep seeing people assigning inappropriate importance to the relative population position within a particular country when this isn't a causal factor for most things. Yes there are some things like the distribution of government institutions or corporate offices that are affected by a city's position within a country. But most things like suburban sprawl, transit usage, etc. really aren't. Those things are mostly based on the actual size along with the local geographic, regulatory, and economic conditions. Things being "versions" of megacities when they're nowhere near that size just isn't a thing.

Exactly. Oslo is a city that just reached 1 million inh. Should we expect it to have Tokyo densities only because it's the undisputable primate Norwegian city?

Originally Posted by craigs

So let me get this straight: we're going to compare the population densities of the two most populous metropolitan areas in Australia with the two most populous metropolitan areas in the United States, right?

Oh--wait! No! That wouldn't produce the outcome that we have already decided that we want to see.

So . . . we'll have to come up with some random reason to substitute less populous US cities, cities that are chosen for being less dense to keep us on track to our pre-ordained goal. We'll invent a reason to cherry-pick cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, to that end.

Got it.

Pick up the 5 most populated urban areas in Australian and 50 most populated in the US. Australians would be denser by at least 50%. They are considerably denser than American counterparts and that's a fact, liking it or not.

Go to page 81 (or 83 on the top): http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf . You have 40 US urban areas before an Australian one shows up.

[nec209]

Originally Posted by craigs

So let me get this straight: we're going to compare the population densities of the two most populous metropolitan areas in Australia with the two most populous metropolitan areas in the United States, right?

Oh--wait! No! That wouldn't produce the outcome that we have already decided that we want to see.

So . . . we'll have to come up with some random reason to substitute less populous US cities, cities that are chosen for being less dense to keep us on track to our pre-ordained goal. We'll invent a reason to cherry-pick cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, to that end.

Got it.

I believe the more dense cities in the US would be along the west coast, the great lakes and old rust belt cities at the time.

Well the sun belt cities and mid west cities would be more sprawl.