Quote:
Originally Posted by Chicago103
Also O'Hare Airport as well which is fully within city limits, Midway Airport also takes up over a square mile of land. You are right about the vast Lake Calumet area, it is quite amazing how much empty land there is down there. I have been biking down there a few times and there is a stretch of Stoney Island just east of Lake Calumet from 103rd street to the Calumet River, over three miles where you will not see a single building, its all just open fields, swamps, ponds, landfills that look like small mountains, its so surreal its hard to believe you are still within Chicago city limits. It also shows how dense the rest of the city must be to rack up those kinds of density numbers with so much empty and non-residential land.
|
Exactly. I believe that area is managed as part of the Cook County Forest Preserve system, no? They also have other sites, particularly in the northwest portion of the city. I'm not sure the total area in square miles, but it's not insignificant. When you add that to the twenty square miles of O'Hare and nearly twelve square miles of city parks (administered by the park district), you end up with a habitable area maybe 20% less than Chicago's total land area of 227 square miles.
Furthermore, if I understand Chicago's zoning, there are vast swaths of land dedicated to industrial use and are therefore uninhabitable, and vast swaths of land formerly dedicated to industrial use but which have yet to be redeveloped, sitting empty.
Calculate all this uninhabitable and uninhabited area, subtract it from Chicago's total land area, and you arrive at a population density figure much greater that the 11.8k/square mile.
Chicago is one example (and the one I know best). I'm sure, to varying degrees, you could do the same for the other cities on that list. Hence, I don't think it's safe to assume that L.A. would automatically go from tenth to second or third if one were to perform a more accurate calculation of population density on those cities.