A city of 6.9 billion people may seem like the beginning of a dystopian novel, especially if it is a sprawling suburban city of 6.9 billion people. The blog Per Square Mile created a series of maps that shows just how big a city holding the world’s population would need to be at various densities. If 6.9 billion people squeezed into Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi is startling, just image the traffic congestion if Houston sprawled across the entire Continental U.S.
- Melissa
Although the first day of summer is not officially until June 21 in the US, many American’s consider the season to have begun yesterday with Memorial Day. For the writers here at Encountering Urbanization this summer also is a time of transition, travels and international moves as many of us just graduated (hence our recent hiatus from blogging) and are now preparing for the next steps in our careers. Even with all of these upcoming changes we are very excited to continue writing about the experience of urbanization from our new positions across the globe while also working with some new writers based at NYU Wagner’s graduate urban planning program.
With all of this moving in mind I can’t help but think about how connected our cities are becoming across the world. From literal connections of passenger and cargo flights, to virtual connections based on internet communication, we are all aware of how much easier it is to conduct business abroad today as opposed to a few decades ago. Below are a series of visualizations that focus on these connections.
Examining direct flights between cities is one of the most literal ways to visualization how connected we are becoming. I created this graphic (click to enlarge) for the Rudin Center for Transportation at NYU, to display the top ten most traveled international passenger routes in the world. Considering the density of East and South East Asia it is not surprising to see where the majority of these flights are concentrated.
Of course the internet has also brought cities closer together through more efficient communication. Bestiario in Barcelona presents an interactive graphic of the informational distances between cities, by representing the strengths of the relations between cities based on searches in Google. This “informational distance” is calculated by a formula that measures how many times the names two cities appear on similar webpages.
Chris Harrison’s Internet Map, shows a more literal representation of how the internet connects cities. Here is his description of the work:
Using their most recent data at the time (Feb 2007), I created a set of visualizations that display how cities across the globe are interconnected (by router configuration and not physical backbone)… it is important to note that this only reflects density of connections, and not usage – hundreds of people may utilize a single connection in an internet cafe, often the only form of connectivity people have access to in developing nations.
As he mentions it is impossible to truly count how many people are connected in each city since many people share the same internet connection. Despite this the visualization is still striking, with most of the concentration in the US and Europe.
Besides measuring how often people travel to cities abroad and the volume of internet communication between cities, I can’t help but also look at where people actually choose to move abroad. Good created the following graphic to answer the question: Where do young educated people move? Even though this infograph examines countries and not specific cities, it does display how mobile young people are, and thus how much more connected our cities must be. Also the top choice to relocate or the “Haven for the Young and Educated” happens to be a city-state: Singapore.
As we continue to study and work in cities across the globe we are excited about the evolution of this blog as we continue to contribute to the conversation about the experiment and experience of urbanization.
- Melissa
Photo Credits: All linked to sources except the aviation data, created by the author.
We know that we are increasingly urbanizing but visualizing this phenomenon is difficult, that is why Bestiario‘s “590 Cities” presents such a sticking image of urban population changes. Visualizing.org describes this amazing stacked flow chart,
…that manages to pack all of those details into a single digital square. The visualization depicts the world’s 590 most populous cities, sorted column by column according to their population size between 1950 and 2010, with projections for 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2050. By rolling over the lines you can highlight individual cities’ growth trends.
Click on the images to see the full screen interactive visualizations of 590, read more about it on visualizing.org.
- Melissa
Usually Asia and not Africa comes to mind when we hear about rapid urbanization. UN-HABITAT however, warns that over the next 40 years Africa’s urban population will triple. With this trend in mind the results of Riccardo Pravettoni’s map below seem quite startling when one considers how many of Africa’s urban residents already live in slums.
Riccardo Pravettoni at UNEP/GRID-Arendal, a collaborating centre of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), uses pie charts to visualizes the share of urban populations living in slums – areas defined as lacking infrastructure such as permanent housing, piped water and sewerage systems.
- Melissa
MIT’s SENSEable City Lab presents “LIVE Singapore!,” a series of five different perspectives of flowing real time data in Singapore. The exhibit is composed of: multi-dimensional maps… showing the movement of crowds, taxis, airline passengers, the cityʼs fast changing microclimatic conditions, the islandʼs electricity consumption, as well as shipping containers passing through the worldʼs largest trans-shipment sea port in real-time.
The project was developed as part of the Future Urban Mobility research initiative at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). According to the projects leader the exhibit is:
…just the beginning of something that aims to develop into an open platform for the management of urban realtime data and the engagement of developer communities in writing innovative applications for the city.
Although this exhibit looks visually striking, the true test of the project’s success will be in how this information is actually shared with citizens. In order to have a “real city” of flowing data, Singapore and MIT’s SENSEable City Lab should make the open platform for this data available not just for citizens to view in the internet but also to use and edit on other platforms. Needless to say it will be interesting to see how this data-rich city works with MIT as this project unfolds.
LIVE Singapore! will be on display at Singapore Art Museum from April 8th until May 1st, 2011. Read more from FlowingData.
- Melissa
Container Ship Activity
Have you ever wondered how photogenic your city is? Eric Fischer created a series of maps, ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each city. He use geotagged photo information from public Flickr and Picasa folders to create these maps. Here are his top five cities:
1. New York City
2. London
3. Paris
4. San Francisco
5. Berlin
The complete set ranks 100 cities across the world. Fischer does offer one disclaimer to his ranking system though:
This is a little unfair to aggressively polycentric cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles, which probably get lower placement than they really deserve because there are gaps where no one took any pictures.
Besides considering the general urban form of polycentric cities shaping where we take pictures, it is also very interesting to note that the top tweleve cities are all in North America and Europe, with Hong Kong appearing at #13. Leading me to wonder how would these rankings look if data from popular photo sharing websites in Asia was also included in Fischer’s maps?
- Melissa
Berlin
New York
Istanbul
After last week’s post Comparing Urban Form and then seeing these amazing comparative maps by French artist Armelle Caron I was inspired to investigate urban form a little deeper. One description of Caron’s work says,
Caron strips cities of their spatial context. Roads and rivers become irrelevant, districts and parks disappear. The relationship between built-up areas and empty spaces is obliterated. The city is hung out to dry by its smallest constituent parts. The cartographic compact – maps, however imperfect and partial on paper, are reliable real-world guides – is nullified. The city is un-mapped.
As a New Yorker that spends a large portion of my time studying Asian cities, and traveling to them whenever the opportunity arises, I am always curious as to why some of my favorite artistic interpretations of comparative urban form never seem to compare Asian cities with western cities. This stark contrast based on shear size of Asian cities compared with Western cities seems an exciting enough reason to further explore their urban patterns. So I decided to use Open Street Maps and some basic Photoshops skills to compare city blocks in Shanghai’s Pudong district (on the eastern side of the river) with lower Manhattan, since both serve as financial districts. Of course my maps are not as in depth of a study as Caron’s deconstructed cities but you can still notice a striking difference between Shanghai’s massive new development in Pudong (east portion) with the Bund and other historic development in Pu Xi (west portions). Even more striking though is that even the blocks of Pu Xi seems large compared to lower Manhattan.
Shanghai
Manhattan
After walking the massive blocks of Pudong this summer I was not that surprised when I realize that one block in Pudong was the same size as about 6 blocks in Lower Manhattan. What is surprising though is to consider what the size of these city blocks may mean about the density of these cities if future development mirrored these sections.
Melissa
Have you ever wondered how New York City’s urban form compares to London? Or the ancient streets of Rome? This comparison from Bricoleurbanism compares eight famous cities’ urban form at the same scale to the city of Mississauga, ON, revealing “the inherent problems of scale in trying to evolve any suburban, auto-oriented area into a more pedestrian-oriented center.”
I would be fascinated to see a similar comparison of these cities with Asian Megacities. Until then I will just have to share this comparison of urban density in Johannesburg, London, New York and Shanghai from The Endless City.
Melissa
Ring roads are not loved by all planners, but the are certainly fascinating when compared across the world on this poster by Rice University’s School of Architecture: Rings Roads of the World.
Melissa
I love infographics.
Especially visually stunning infographics from Information is Beautiful and Good. So as I was working this morning I was very excited to find an online book on public housing typologies in Hong Kong. Celia Ho presents clear and informative graphics about the growth of Hong Kong’s population, public housing milestones and the changing shape of housing estates from 1950 to the present. I especially enjoyed the graphic that shows how housing estates have gotten taller with fewer flats per floor. The whole book can be found here: Reinterpretation of Hong Kong Housing Typologies.
Melissa
