Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Oddly enough my original comment was prompted by how different Halifax and Victoria look in the recent aerials posted.
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Yes but I took it to be a comment about the actual appearance diverging from the expectation that they should look similar, in part because they have similar metro populations. You said it was amazing that they were strikingly different, not that they were different just as one would expect for cities spanning 5,000 km.
I think the expectation depends on the starting point. One distinctly Canadian way to begin is city size or centre vs. periphery (with different regions having a different sense of that; and variant being "everything but my region is roughly the same", somewhat popular in Toronto, Quebec, and BC). You could instead start with history and geography. I find that Europeans tend to start from that perspective much more frequently. Actually Atlantic Canadians do too sometimes which leads to a weird situation where regionally people act as if the size difference between Halifax or Saint John or Charlottetown barely matters while people in Halifax will be amazed by the metropolitan wonders of Winnipeg or Ottawa.
In my (arbitrary and nonscientific) "theory of city size" the relationships are geometric instead of linear and there is a "king" effect that counts for one or two size hops. So we should think about halving and doubling of size, and role of the city, instead of just population numbers.
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