urban areas

The government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has outlined plans to create a "second central business district" at Kai Tak in eastern Kowloon, site of the now former international airport. Kai Tak airport was abandoned in 1998 when the new Hong Kong International Airport at Chep Lap Tok opened.  read more »

We recently noted that Ryan Avent was one third right in his recent Sunday New York Times article on urban density. Avent has posted a response suggesting that it is inappropriate to use average urban densities in urban productivity analyses, as we had done, but that "weighted average densities" should be used instead. Weighted average density was not mentioned in his New York Times article.  read more »

Sydney's Daily Telegraph announced on April 20 that Sydney is more dense than Mexico City, London, Los Angeles and Paris. Of course, anyone who has been to Mexico City or London knows that this is untrue and it may surprise some that Sydney is not even as dense as Los Angeles.  read more »

Only two of the world's megacities (metropolitan areas or urban areas with more than 10 million people) have adopted names that are more reflective of their geographical reality than their former core-based names. It is likely that this will spread to other megacities and urban areas as the core jurisdictions that supplied the names for most become even less significant in the dispersing urban area.  read more »

China has been urbanizing at a break-neck pace. Between 1980 and 2010, nearly China's urban areas have added 450 million people, nearly 1.5 times the population of the United States. Nearly one-half (47%) of the nation's population now lives in urban areas and the figure is expected to exceed 60% by 2030, according to United Nations data.  read more »

Reporters, columnists and even consultants often misunderstand urban areas and urban terms. The result can be absurd statements that compare the area in which the writer lives to somewhere else where the grass is inevitably greener, bringing to mind an expensive competitiveness report that suggested St. Louis should look to Cleveland as a model. Sometimes this is the result of just not understanding and other times it results from listening to itinerant missionaries from idealized areas who have no sense of the reality.  read more »

For years, planners and others have raised concerns about the amount of land that urbanization occupies, especially in the United States and other developed nations. My attention was recently drawn to an estimate that 2.7% of the world's land (excluding Antarctica) is occupied by urban development.  read more »

It has been a horrendous week in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the world's most dense urban area (104,000 population per square mile/40,000 per square kilometer). On Tuesday, a five story residential building collapsed, killing 23 people in the building and in other structures in the path of the collapse. Then, on Thursday evening, a fire started on the lower floors of an 8-story residential building in the old town section of Dhaka.  read more »

Our colleague and frequent NewGeography contributor Wendell Cox of Demographia.com recently released the latest edition of his World Urban Areas and Population Projections publication.

This 5th comprehensive edition includes:  read more »

Ranking of the largest world urban areas (over 2,000,000 population).

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Colin McEnroe's piece in the Hartford Courant is a frightening tale about the indifference of the police to crime when it becomes so commonplace. A two hour wait for a call about a burglary. "I live in Gotham City, but there's no Batman."