Quote:
Originally Posted by mistercorporate
People overstate how big Manhattan is, downtown Toronto is just as dense as Lower Manhattan, and midtown is pretty close to Midtown. We just have Riverdale Park to the East, UofT's low density strip to the West and the St. Mike's hospital flight path that limits height between Massey Tower and Ryerson, so aerial shots make it look like it's less dense than it is because of all the low rises on the periphery:
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Uhmmmm...nope.
Manhattan is definitely more dense than Toronto. It seems to me that you're seriously underestimating Manhattan and grossly exaggerating Toronto's density.
Virtually every single thing in that image of Manhattan is high density. Not to mention that it doesn't include anything across the rivers and harbors. Manhattan alone has about 520 million square feet of office space compared to Toronto's 70.
I just did a quick quasi-comparison of my own. I managed to draw a fairly generous perimeter of downtown Toronto. I still couldn't help but get a few single family homes in the form of row housing and three storey walk-ups. As well, there were more than a few parking lots and unused former/current industrial areas. My area came out to roughly 21 square kilometers.
For New York I stopped at the rather arbitrary point of a line running along the northern edge of Central Park. Arbitrary because it doesn't stop there but at 30 square kilometers (roughly) it was more than large enough to make the point. In New York it was difficult to find anything lower than 3 storeys and even those were somewhat rare. Additionally, the average height of the "low" stuff was 5 or 6 floors. On top of that, there were far more skyscrapers and they were much taller. It was wall to wall high density and, again, it didn't really end anywhere near the perimeter you drew. Also, Manhattan is roughly 3 kilometers wide (at the narrowest point) whereas Toronto is roughly 1 and a half at best at its widest. It's much, much smaller...more of a strip by comparison to Manhattan.
I honestly don't understand why you said what you said but you're clearly off base. If you want to compare a few blocks of Toronto to Manhattan then sure, it's an apt comparison. Now compare the densest parts of Manhattan to the densest parts of Toronto and still see if there's a comparison to be made. Toronto's dense and it's a great city but please...there's no comparison here. If there is then virtually every city in North America can be "as dense as Manhattan." if you only include the densest few blocks. New York is an alpha level city and quite possibly the world's top city overall. Toronto is a beta class city and while it's globally known, it's no New York. The only city that even gets in the same ballpark in North America is Chicago and while it certainly has a very impressive skyline, it's fairly well defined and smaller in its footprint than Manhattan.
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