Urban footprints
 

What urban area is the largest
I was bored on Sunday, and was looking at Google maps, I was scanning all the urban areas, represented in gray, and I noticed that the largest urban foot print of any city appears to be wrapped along the bottom of Lake Michigan, the Chicago region, second looks like NY then maybe Dallas, this is interesting since the largest US city doesn't have the largest urban footprint, based on Google Maps

And Los Angeles? I would think that's the largest out of all of them, it stretches for forever.

here are the top 10 largest US Urban Areas by land area:

1. New York - 3,450.2 sq. miles
2. Atlanta - 2,645.4 sq. miles
3. Chicago - 2,442.8 sq. miles
4. Philadelphia - 1,981.4 sq. miles
5. Boston - 1,873.5 sq. miles
6. Dallas - 1,779.1 sq. miles
7. Los Angeles - 1,736.0 sq. miles
8. Houston - 1,660.0 sq. miles
9. Detroit - 1,337.2 sq. miles
10. Washington - 1,321.7 sq. miles

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...es_urban_areas

On the E-W axis, for sure. It’s a good 100+ miles from Calabasas to Mentone.

How in the world do you think Dallas is larger than LA.

/From suburb to suburb 160 or more. Ventura/Oxnard to whatever.
I'd say 115 north to south.

Its basically a state.

I know most of Anchorage Alaska is mostly not urban but that is probably the largest footprint of city limits in the USA that I know of on a per capita basis.


1,944.05 sq mi


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorage,_Alaska


it is Alaska's most populous city and contains 39.37% of the state's population; among the 50 states, only New York has a higher percentage of residents who live in its most populous city. The Anchorage metropolitan area, which includes Anchorage and the neighboring Matanuska-Susitna Borough, had a population of 396,317 in 2019, accounting for more than half the state's population. At 1,706 square miles (4,420 km2) of land area, the city is the fourth-largest by area in the United States and larger than the smallest state, Rhode Island, which has 1,212 square miles (3,140 km2)

The city limits span 1,961.1 square miles (5,079.2 km2),












I'm surprised Atlanta sprawled so much honestly for not being that really a big of a city. I know it has like a thousand counties but really More than LA or DWF or Chicagoland?


Being so high and elevated I see water problems there.

This makes no sense.
What are they counting as urban? A subdivision?

I would add Bridgeport UA to New York and San Bernardino UA to Los Angeles.

An area with urban development with at least 100 people/sq mile.

I think that coastal Southeast Florida has the largest continuous urban footprint in the US.

There are no significant breaks in it for about 200 miles. It's a completely paved over, unnatural environment.

^^^ Maybe the longest, but it's not that large compared to its peers.

In general, the US census bureau defines Urban Areas as contiguous census tracts with at least 1,000 ppsm.

There are some exceptions and finer points to that, but that's the general gist.

Because eastern cities tend to have much "softer" edges, they tend to encompass more land area.

And there is some quirkiness in Cali where the LA/IE & SF/SJ UA's are split from each other because of geography.

Anyway, here's a map of US Urban Areas and Urban Clusters (urban Clusters are the same thing as urban areas, they just fall below the 50,000 people threshold)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...rban-Areas.svg
Source: wikipedia

It's really the continuous part about southeast coastal Florida that I'm talking about.

Zoom out to 100 or 200 miles on Google Maps -- I don't think anywhere will show up as a bigger continuous stretch of gray than the south Florida concrete artificiality. Other mega-regions with even a bit of actual topography to speak of at least have hills, mountains, forested land, etc. to break it up at least a little bit.

The Atlantic Coast of Florida is pretty much the world's longest strip mall.

Thiis type of mapping displaying more "urbanized area" versus fully developed urban footprint.

Even within the massive sprawl of a SoCal, NYC area, etc., there exists significant portions of undeveloped land, be it forested areas and/or mountainous areas, both publicly and privately-owned.

In this representation, the red areas don't fully equal "concrete"... except for south Florida. :( Except for a handful of relatively small parks along near the shoreline, it's pretty accurate to say that the long stretch of red down the south Florida coast is concrete... and kinda depressing to think how fully man-made the environment along the Florida coast is.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...rban-Areas.svg

That explains LA's #7 ranking.

Though it is also much denser than most other US urban areas.

By average density LA's UA is THE densest in the US, but by the much more meaningful metric of weighted density, no one comes close to touching NYC.


If you combine the Riverside UA to LA's, you end up with 2,281 sq. miles, bumping it up to 4th place just behind chicago.

LA just feels the biggest because areas not officially included are more or less seamless with the LA area; Ventura, IE, etc.

The map really overestimates the Eastern US cities footprints versus the West Coast cities, in my opinion.

The NY Metro area is large, yes- but it isn't squashed in and wall-to-wall quite the same way the LA metro region is. I guarantee you the density in the middle of Connecticut, Eastern Long Island, and Monmouth County NJ does not warrant the metropolitan footprint shown on the map in the same way that say, Anaheim does in the LA metro.

This is true. It's basically what I was saying above. The only eastern US urban footprint that is "squashed in and wall-to-wall quite the same way the LA metro region is" (and even more so than SoCal because there are no mountains) is the south Florida coastal strip.

As I said before, eastern cities tend to have MUCH softer edges than western cities. In the east, you usually have hundreds upon hundreds of sq. miles of "country sprawl" (horse country, people living in the woods, etc.) surrounding major cities that just barely squeak above the 1,000 ppsm threshold. You don't have anywhere near as much of that out west.

If you raised the minimum tract density to around 5,000 ppsm, LA probably would become the largest UA by area.