Is the meaning of urban and suburban relative?

[nito]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

It's not just Manhattanites. Manhattan is used as the reference point of urban for all of New York City, and most of New York Metro. There is an unscientific scale of urbanity that metropolitan New Yorkers generally agree on and use to describe places around the metro area. It is very encoded in the way people who live in the region speak about not only this city, but also in how they describe this city to other places.

40k/sq mile is a medium density neighborhood for New York City. High density for New York City would be above 70k/sq mile.

New York City also contains a lot of under-utilized land. Staten Island alone accounts for 20% of the land area of New York City, but only 5% of the population.

I steer away from making international comparisons based on a calculated weighted density because the most granular block of measurement is highly specific to each country's statistics bureau. For U.S. cities, we use census tracts to compare to each other, which have a fairly standard application across the United States but obviously can't be used to calculate weighted densities in Hong Kong, Tokyo, or London.

That said, I've never been to Hong Kong, so I can't really comment on how it feels relative to New York. I have been to Tokyo and I am quite confident that New York peaks in density far higher than Tokyo. Average density stats are harder to get a "feel" for on the ground due to differing land uses and geographic definitions/constraints, but it also does not surprise me one bit that New York's average density is substantially higher than Tokyo's. Tokyo is a humongous city, and it is a dense city by modern wealthy nation standards, it has massive train stations with enormous amounts of foot traffic, but it doesn't feel more densely populated than New York City.

Even if you stripped out Staten Island, you would still have a lower population density than the 23 special wards.

Manhattan unquestionably has neighbourhoods which are amongst the most densely populated areas in the developed world, but that density tapers off, and then you eventually encounter miles of clearly low-density, automobile-dominated, spread out suburbs.

Where a few eyebrows were raised was the clearly silly comments that clearly urban and dense environments in Tokyo (like Meguro) are considered suburban.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by nito

Even if you stripped out Staten Island, you would still have a lower population density than the 23 special wards.

You would have much higher weighted density in NYC, which is obviously more representative of relative neighborhood feel.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by nito

Even if you stripped out Staten Island, you would still have a lower population density than the 23 special wards.

Manhattan unquestionably has neighbourhoods which are amongst the most densely populated areas in the developed world, but that density tapers off, and then you eventually encounter miles of clearly low-density, automobile-dominated, spread out suburbs.

Where a few eyebrows were raised was the clearly silly comments that clearly urban and dense environments in Tokyo (like Meguro) are considered suburban.

None of the 23 wards are as dense as Manhattan. The 23 wards together have about the same population density as Brooklyn. That is not an extraordinary density to a New Yorker. Just like there are parts of Brooklyn that a New Yorker would call a little "suburban", there are parts of the 23 wards that would like a little "suburban" to a New Yorker.

[nito]

Originally Posted by Crawford

You would have much higher weighted density in NYC, which is obviously more representative of relative neighborhood feel.

When discussing specific “neighbourhood feel”, city-wide population densities/weighted densities are immaterial.

The simple point here is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to what defines or constitutes an urban area, but there are multiple variables, such as working and resident population density, urban form, active travel and public transportation versus private vehicle usage, which help to frame our thinking of whether an area is urban versus suburban, or somewhere between on a scale.

Originally Posted by iheartthed

None of the 23 wards are as dense as Manhattan. The 23 wards together have about the same population density as Brooklyn. That is not an extraordinary density to a New Yorker. Just like there are parts of Brooklyn that a New Yorker would call a little "suburban", there are parts of the 23 wards that would like a little "suburban" to a New Yorker.

I think you (and others) are conflating Manhattan and New York. Manhattan only accounts for 19% of New York’s population and has a population density 155% above the figure for New York (total). If we’re considering an area like Meguro “suburban”, when it has a population density 75% above that for New York, and 30% above that of Brooklyn, there aren’t many urban areas.

[Minato Ku]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

New York City also contains a lot of under-utilized land. Staten Island alone accounts for 20% of the land area of New York City, but only 5% of the population.

Just a note, you can't possibly compare Staten Island with the mountainous western third of Tokyo Prefecture.
Staten Island is a fully urbanized area, New York City limits are fully urbanized land.


Tokyo Prefecture by Minato ku, sur Flickr

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by nito

I think you (and others) are conflating Manhattan and New York. Manhattan only accounts for 19% of New York’s population and has a population density 155% above the figure for New York (total). If we’re considering an area like Meguro “suburban”, when it has a population density 75% above that for New York, and 30% above that of Brooklyn, there aren’t many urban areas.

I am not conflating Manhattan with New York you all just like to argue lol. There are not 1.5 million people in Tokyo that live in a population density near or higher than the average density of Manhattan. Manhattan is what New Yorkers attune their scale of urban-to-suburban. Not sure why this is so controversial to some people other than for ax grinding purposes lol.

[Docere]

I don't buy it. There's lots of bonda fide low density suburbia 25 miles from Manhattan.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by nito

Manhattan unquestionably has neighbourhoods which are amongst the most densely populated areas in the developed world, but that density tapers off, and then you eventually encounter miles of clearly low-density, automobile-dominated, spread out suburbs.

Most of the densest neighborhoods in the NYC area are outside of Manhattan. In fact the structurally densest neighborhoods are not among the densest (due to heavy share of nonresidential uses).

Even excluding Manhattan, the region's core would be among the densest in the developed world. Excluding Manhattan, the NYC area would still have more high density tracts than Tokyo.

And while the region's geography is heavily skewed low density, the region's weighted density shows that most of the population lives in fairly dense surroundings, not in the leafy, wealthy SFH geographies. There aren't that many people living in Backcountry CT or the North Shore of LI or the Hunt Country in NJ, though those geographies cover enormous space.

[nito]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I am not conflating Manhattan with New York you all just like to argue lol. There are not 1.5 million people in Tokyo that live in a population density near or higher than the average density of Manhattan. Manhattan is what New Yorkers attune their scale of urban-to-suburban. Not sure why this is so controversial to some people other than for ax grinding purposes lol.

That is an insular view to possess, because Manhattan density is irrelevant in terms of understanding urbanism internationally. Adding to that, density and the urban profile of Manhattan is itself not uniform (e.g. Inwood).

To underline the absurdity, if Manhattan density was the baseline variable, not even the City of Paris would meet the threshold of an urban area.

[Docere]

The difference between NYC and other American cities isn't the lack of suburbia, it's that the urban core is significantly denser. That doesn't mean that the somewhat less dense urban areas "revert" to suburban.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by nito

That is an insular view to possess, because Manhattan density is irrelevant in terms of understanding urbanism internationally. Adding to that, density and the urban profile of Manhattan is itself not uniform (e.g. Inwood).

To underline the absurdity, if Manhattan density was the baseline variable, not even the City of Paris would meet the threshold of an urban area.

Have you ever been to Inwood? Inwood has a MUCH higher population density than the Manhattan average, so you're not making the point you think you're making here lol. Nothing in Tokyo is even half as dense as Inwood.

[nito]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Have you ever been to Inwood? Inwood has a MUCH higher population density than the Manhattan average, so you're not making the point you think you're making here lol. Nothing in Tokyo is even half as dense as Inwood.

Inwood has a density close to half that of Manhattan. Whilst irrelevant, 15 of Tokyo’s Special Wards have a population density above Inwood (representing a population of 5.3mn).

Again, nobody is disputing the high density of Manhattan, more that using Manhattan as a baseline to define urban/suburban is questionable to say the least. It would be like saying New York isn’t a sporting city because it hasn’t held an Olympics.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by nito

Inwood has a density close to half that of Manhattan. Whilst irrelevant, 15 of Tokyo’s Special Wards have a population density above Inwood (representing a population of 5.3mn).

Because most of Inwood's land area is either parkland or railyard. Here are the population densities of census tracts in Inwood:

295: 134,481 / square mile
293: 132,487 / square mile
307: 105,197 / square mile
303: 61,025 / square mile
299: 15,126 / square mile
297: 44 / square mile

Originally Posted by nito

Again, nobody is disputing the high density of Manhattan, more that using Manhattan as a baseline to define urban/suburban is questionable to say the least. It would be like saying New York isn’t a sporting city because it hasn’t held an Olympics.

No, it is not the same. Manhattan is the New York area's ideal of urban. Not sure why you think it's weird for New Yorker's to measure "urbanity" according to the core of their own city? What else would they measure it from?

[nito]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Because most of Inwood's land area is either parkland or railyard. Here are the population densities of census tracts in Inwood:
295: 134,481 / square mile 293: 132,487 / square mile 307: 105,197 / square mile 303: 61,025 / square mile 299: 15,126 / square mile 297: 44 / square mile

And other places on the planet don’t also have parks, roads, railways and other non-residential amenities that reduce the density of an area?

Originally Posted by iheartthed

No, it is not the same. Manhattan is the New York area's ideal of urban. Not sure why you think it's weird for New Yorker's to measure "urbanity" according to the core of their own city? What else would they measure it from?

As raised previously, that is more a reflection of an insular mindset that seems to be ignorant to different concepts of what an urban area is, how they are formed, defined and what they look like.

Midtown Manhattan has a population density 40% below that of Manhattan as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that Midtown is less urban than say the Upper East Side, because as you will know, what it lacks for in residential density, it more than compensates (and goes beyond) that in terms of office population, tourist/leisure population, transport amenities, and the sheer volume of vertical development. There simply isn’t a one size fits all.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by nito

And other places on the planet don’t also have parks, roads, railways and other non-residential amenities that reduce the density of an area?

Inwood is less than one square mile in area and over half of it is parkland or railyard. Yes, that is unusual. Everyone that lives in Inwood lives in a contiguous area that is less than half of a square mile. Of the roughly 36k people that live in Inwood, 30k of them live in census tracts that average more than 100k/ square mile.

Just about the entire west 1/3rd of Inwood is parkland. Just about all of the eastern 1/4th of Inwood is a railyard for NYC Transit.

Originally Posted by nito

As raised previously, that is more a reflection of an insular mindset that seems to be ignorant to different concepts of what an urban area is, how they are formed, defined and what they look like.

If it's insular for New Yorkers to have an opinion about what "urban" means, then it is also insular for any other place on earth to have an opinion about it.

Originally Posted by nito

Midtown Manhattan has a population density 40% below that of Manhattan as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that Midtown is less urban than say the Upper East Side, because as you will know, what it lacks for in residential density, it more than compensates (and goes beyond) that in terms of office population, tourist/leisure population, transport amenities, and the sheer volume of vertical development. There simply isn’t a one size fits all.

I never said that residential density was the litmus test for how New Yorkers think of what is "urban":

Originally Posted by iheartthed

For New Yorkers, the definitions of "urban" vs "suburban" more or less means where you can most easily live car-free versus where things are more car-friendly. It's also not cleanly correlated to density for NYers. Places where residences have driveways and/or garages are usually bucketed as "suburbanish" or "suburban" in the minds of NYers..

[Quixote]

^ This is your original post, and it's laden with nonsense.

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Someone posted a density map of Tokyo a while ago, but I have no idea what thread it was. Tokyo's density topped out around the 40k people per square mile, if I recall correctly, while New York tops out over 100k people per square mile. But Tokyo's density stays in that 20k - 40k ppsm range over a much broader area than can be matched by NYC, which makes sense because Tokyo has a much larger geographical footprint, at over twice the physical area of NYC. But New York is clearly a much denser city than Tokyo. It's pretty clear from the top line numbers alone:

Tokyo density: 16.4k people per square mile
New York City density: 29.3k people per square mile

Tokyo's density is more similar to San Francisco (18.6k ppsm), but it just holds that density over an area 20 times the area of San Francisco.

1) Tokyo's density doesn't "top out" at 40K per square mile; that's the 23 wards' average. Tokyo is the only city in the developed world (that I can think of) that houses a megapolis-sized population (10+ million) at that density level.

2) Roughly one third of Tokyo Metropolis' land area is mountainous and sparsely populated. Its true density is about 25K per square mile.

3) That density average of 25K per square mile is closer to NYC than SF.

4) While 25K isn't nominally high, it's a much different story when it's the average across 650-660 square miles that are home to some 14+ million people.

5) If residential density isn't a proxy for "urban," then why did you even bring it up? Reading between the lines, your argument *has been* that Tokyo is relatively less urban than NYC because NYers use Manhattan as their anchor for assessing where places fall along the urban-suburban spectrum, and much of that assessment is based on look/feel and further distorted by narrow framing.

[Docere]

Perhaps 10% of NYC residents live in areas with a "suburban" character, if that. And obviously the "suburban areas" of eastern Queens or Staten Island isn't like central Tokyo or inner London at all.

What's an example of an area that's "suburban" in NYC but would be "extremely urban" anywhere else?

[Nouvellecosse]

When I look at Tokyo dense residential areas compared to Manhattan, Tokyo definitely looks less dense in that it doesn't have street after street of highrise and midrise like most of Manhattan does. But it honestly doesn't seem less urban; it just seems differently urban. I think it's in large part because Tokyo has such narrow, winding streets with such finely-grained fabric that it seems almost claustrophobic.

In my experience, once a city reaches a certain point where it gets full points for being urban, making it denser doesn't make it any more urban. It just makes it denser. The same way that cities can have other differences like architectural styles, the amount and type of vegetation, street layout, etc. yet all be equally urban, I think the same can apply to density levels. It's just not something we run into that often in NA since so few of hour cities actually achieve full marks for being urban outside a relatively small area. In some cities, not even downtowns would get full marks. If the urban-suburban spectrum is measured on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being full urban points and anything 6 or higher is considered urban, a lot of urban areas in NA would be in the 6-9 range. In those cases, making them more dense would add urban points by making urban amenities more feasible or redeveloping empty lots. So we're used to measuring urban bona fides with density stats.

[pdxtex]

To the census, urban means cement. To people around here, "urban" means high density.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Quixote

5) If residential density isn't a proxy for "urban," then why did you even bring it up? Reading between the lines, your argument *has been* that Tokyo is relatively less urban than NYC because NYers use Manhattan as their anchor for assessing where places fall along the urban-suburban spectrum, and much of that assessment is based on look/feel and further distorted by narrow framing.

Urban density can be a proxy for urban, but it is not the only proxy. Obviously. What are we doing here? lol. Read this again:

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I never said that residential density was the litmus test for how New Yorkers think of what is "urban":

Watch closely for definite and indefinite articles when you read things. It is really important to understanding the context of written language.