Quote:
Originally Posted by TimCity2000
is there an official definition of "downtown" that can be used to compare cities?
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No, there is no official definition of a given city's "downtown", so this exercise is always open to lots of interpretation, and makes direct comparisons quite challenging, and usually meaningless.
The closest thing you can get to a somewhat direct apples-to-apples comparison is the census bureau's calculations of "x" number of people living withing "y" miles of a city's city hall, though that is also quite imperfect as most downtowns don't spread out from their city's city hall in perfect concentric rings. Water, topography, industrial zones/corridors, non-CBD city halls, and many other factors can greatly complicate that particular measure.