Is the meaning of urban and suburban relative?

[craigs]

If we are now talking about how places "look" to people living in outliers like Manhattan then the answer to the thread question is unequivocally "yes."

[Docere]

Even Riverdale and Forest Hills, which have leafy SFH sections, have population densities of about 50,000 per square mile as most of the population lives in big apartments.

[Crawford]

Right. Riverdale and Forest Hills are most known for their leafy, upscale SFH streets, but both neighborhoods mostly consist of more middle class apartment blocks, usually dating from 1950's thru 1970's.

[Steely Dan]

Detached SFH can also seem more ubiquitous than they really are because they take up a lot more land area relative to MFH.

Even on my mixed flats and SFH block in Chicago, SFHs only make up 6 of the 106 housing units on our street (5.6%), but they take up 6 of the 40 lots (15%).

Do that math for a much more intensely dense NYC neighborhood, and you could probably get something like 5% of the housing units as SFH's taking up 30 or 40% of the land area. Maybe more?

[iheartthed]

Proper Riverdale is pretty low density by NYC standards. It's probably not higher than 10k ppsm. But the Riverdale subregion from the Furman Center map includes a lot of very densely populated areas around Riverdale that brings the density up quite a bit.

Edit: You can see this on the Census Bureau density map from 2020. If you zoom in around Riverdale, the tract that covers Riverdale is only 7k per square mile and it even includes some of the denser areas to the north of proper Riverdale. But just east of the Henry Hudson Pkwy there are tracts with over 100k per square mile. https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Proper Riverdale is pretty low density by NYC standards. It's probably not higher than 10k ppsm. But the Riverdale subregion from the Furman Center map includes a lot of very densely populated areas around Riverdale that balance it out.

Riverdale is usually divided into three sections - Central Riverdale, North Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil. All three are pretty dense and have a lot more apartment residents than SFH residents.

There are some streets overlooking the Hudson that have almost country-like density (esp. Fieldston section) but that's a very small portion of overall Riverdale population. Fieldston has about 250 SFHs. There are many Riverdale apartment blocks that have 500+ units in a single building.

[3rd&Brown]

Originally Posted by steely dan

are these political terms or built environment descriptors?

Yes.

1000%

[jd3189]

After living in LA for more than a year, I truly believe now that urban and suburban is more of a continuum rather than clear cut definitions.

Every American city has urban and suburban aspects in varying percentages if you consider SFH and car centric design/infrastructure as suburban. Even NYC ( as in the Five Boroughs) has suburban aspects in the outer boroughs.

[Docere]

LA density by neighborhood/sector

http://demographia.com/db-la-area.pdf

I think SFV has a weighted density of about 12,000 per square mile though.

[nito]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Be that as it may, Meguro still has qualities that New Yorkers strongly associate with "suburban", such as private parking spaces and detached buildings. It may look very urban to you, but it looks somewhat suburban to a New Yorker.

Whilst Manhattan certainly doesn’t have the volume of detached dwellings of Meguro and many of those homes have off-street parking, Meguro doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of on-street parking (or possibly off-street underground/multistorey garages) of Manhattan. There is also the rather important point that there simply isn’t the quantum of road infrastructure to facilitate suburban-orientated private automobile lifestyles because most of the roads in Meguro are barely the width of a single vehicle. I’d hazard a guess that walking, cycling and public transport is more prevalent in Meguro than Manhattan.

That isn’t to argue that Manhattan is suburban compared to Meguro, but urban areas take many forms and there is no singular form.

Perhaps it says more of the lack of travelling by New Yorkers to places like Meguro to make such assumptions.

[mrnyc]

^ meguro is five square miles nigel. manhattan is like 35 i think. anyway its hardly 1:1 here pip.

Originally Posted by Docere

Living in city limits is probably a big factor, with Texas cities being quite expansive. 1/4 of Texans live in the cities of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth.

what, el paso is chopped liver? especially when you consider it a suburb of a bigger city than dallas, which it is.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by nito

Whilst Manhattan certainly doesn’t have the volume of detached dwellings of Meguro and many of those homes have off-street parking, Meguro doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of on-street parking (or possibly off-street underground/multistorey garages) of Manhattan. There is also the rather important point that there simply isn’t the quantum of road infrastructure to facilitate suburban-orientated private automobile lifestyles because most of the roads in Meguro are barely the width of a single vehicle. I’d hazard a guess that walking, cycling and public transport is more prevalent in Meguro than Manhattan.

That isn’t to argue that Manhattan is suburban compared to Meguro, but urban areas take many forms and there is no singular form.

Perhaps it says more of the lack of travelling by New Yorkers to places like Meguro to make such assumptions.

New Yorkers opinion about what looks "suburban" are as valid as anyone else's opinion. The fact is that 1) Meguro looks suburban to New Yorkers, and 2) New York is more densely populate than Tokyo by quite a bit, so it's not likely that a Tokyoite would ever think of New York as not being an "urban" place.

[sopas ej]

Ultimately it's all relative and subjective. Nobody, especially on these forums, goes by the dictionary definition of "urban" and "suburban." We're more about walkability and SFHs and easy parking defining what urban and suburban is.

I did a Google Street View of Manhattan and Meguro and randomly placed that little Google Guy on a street, and this is what I got for both:

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6349...oASAFQAw%3D%3D

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.8081...oASAFQAw%3D%3D

Call each what you will.

[TWAK]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Are these political terms or built environment descriptors?

Yes.

Does the Chicago metro have something like "Bay Area"? It's the replacement or an add on for "urban" in that way, especially in rural Northern California.

Once a crime happens somewhere in Northern California, "Bay Area!" might be invoked...especially the further away it is. Since, you know...Bay Area folks are driving 200 miles to Redding to steal a bike.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by TWAK

Does the Chicago metro have something like "Bay Area"? It's the replacement or an add on for "urban" in that way, especially in rural Northern California.

I'm not entirely sure what you specifically mean, but in a broader sense:

"Chicago" is to "Chicagoland" as "San Francisco" is to "Bay Area"

[TWAK]

I didn't really explain it well, but think of it like the regional variation of the negative connotations associated with "urban".

[Docere]

I find it hard to believe that Manhattanites are really so insular that they think that any sub-Manhattan density areas are "suburban." Surely they have been to Long Island, Westchester County or suburban New Jersey at some point in their lives and see the obvious difference with say most of Queens. And what percentage of Manhattanites are actually Manhattan born and raised anyway? Many would have grown up in suburban regions around NYC or in other parts of the US.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by TWAK

I didn't really explain it well, but think of it like the regional variation of the negative connotations associated with "urban".

Oh, in that case it's just "Chicago".

And it's not just regional, it also works as a boogeyman word at the national level for certain things, kinda like how "California" does for other things.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by nito

but urban areas take many forms and there is no singular form.

Ditto for "suburban areas".

As a major metro area with substantial amounts of both pre-war and post-war suburbia, Chicagoland aptly demonstrates that fact.

Traditional "railroad suburb" town centers from the late 19th/early 20th, strung like pearls along the various Metra commuter rail lines radiating out into the hinterlands in all directions, with all of the interspersed leftover space then back-filled during the post-war period with new expressways and all of the usual unrelentingly auto-centric sprawl-burban garbage that defines the era.

Spend an afternoon exploring suburban Chicago via a metra line, then spend another doing the same via an expressway corridor 5 miles over, and you'll swear you just visited two different places. In a way, you kinda did, or at least two different time periods.

[Quixote]

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.

This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, and underscores that administrative boundaries are arbitrary. The cities, towns, and villages that make up Tokyo Metropolis are essentially the Japanese version of "the suburbs."

Tokyo's special wards, which are more analogous to NYC proper, average over 40,000 people per square mile across 239 square miles.

Cities outside the 23 wards:

Chofu: 29,000/SM
Nishitokyo: 34,000/SM
Mitaka: 30,000/SM
Musashino: 35,000/SM
Kokubunji: 29,000/SM
Komae: 34,000/SM

That's another 1 million people across 32 square miles living in densities at or above NYC's average.