What’s “crowded”?
Posted by Dave on March 10, 2010 | 2 Comments
Here in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, I get annoyed when the four-lane expressway into Charlotte gets clogged up. Sometimes it takes 40 minutes to drive the 23 miles into town. Sometimes I’m even bothered when I drive to the neighboring town of Cornelius (population, 15,000), and I have to wait two light-cycles to make a left turn.
So there are times, living in my small suburban town, when it feels a bit crowded. Mecklenburg County’s population density, at about 700 residents per square kilometer, is actually fairly high compared to most of the world. This Wikipedia page calculates that if population were spread equally around the world, average density would be just 44 per square kilometer (of course, that would put a lot of people in places like Antarctica and the Sahara Desert). Manhattan’s density is over 25,000 per km2—over 30 times the density here.
But take a look at this map of world population density:
You can click to see a larger image on Wikipedia. Even the densely populated US east coast still pales in comparison to most of Europe, China, and India. But even this map doesn’t tell the whole story. Places like Charlotte—the most populated urban area in my state—don’t even make the top 200 most populated cities (PDF link). And my county’s density is as high as the scale goes on the map!
Sure, I can drive 20 miles and be among skyscrapers. But if I drive 20 miles in the opposite direction, I can be out of sight of any other human.
I suspect if you ask most people if the world is too crowded, they’ll say yes. But “crowding” isn’t really the problem. People move to urban areas because that’s where jobs are in modern economies. There are still plenty of places that have very few people. The green and orange regions of the map are habitable areas with fewer than 40 people per square kilometer—less than a tenth the density of Mecklenburg County.
Only the pinkish-purple areas on the map are as dense as Mecklenburg—and as you can see, they don’t take up much space at all. Most of the world really isn’t crowded. In my dense county, I’ve got a big house, with trees and birds in the back yard. I even spot an occasional deer within a block or two of my house.
That’s not to say that “population” isn’t a problem. As we’ve seen, the large number of people—especially affluent people—in the world are directly responsible for some of the most significant problems we face today. But that’s the subject of another post.
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March 10th, 2010 @ 5:14 pm
What’s “crowded”? http://goo.gl/fb/Ux24
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
March 11th, 2010 @ 9:19 am
Here’s the question I raise in my most recent @dailymonthly post: what does it mean to be “crowded” http://is.gd/ad3Ti
This comment was originally posted on Twitter