Like we have “largest city” lists,
- most people would think largest city means most populous,
- but some people interpret it as city area,
- so in the former case Mexico City would be the “Largest” city in North america
- in the latter case, LA would be (i haven’t fact checked these, just roll with it)
Some cities are really populous, like Hong Kong, and it means people settle for very little living space just to have access to the opportunities there. Cities grow big largely on the basis of this principle - how many people are willing to slum it in one place together? And historically, the rich have done the opposite; when peasants are cramming themselves into as small a space as possible, the rich are building homes larger than entire villages.
So, to contrast a city of commoners and a city of wealthy people, one effective metric would be to look at the average footage (floor area) of peoples’ homes. Ideally divided by how many people there are, to have it on a per person basis.
I bet the results would be interesting. We’d find loads of places we didn’t know the names of, little hideaway towns which serve as getaways for the wealthy
This can be a surprisingly difficult thing to measure, for a little surprising reason:
The city with most floor space per person is among the cities with the lowest population density. It will be a city where the maximum amount of homes are detached houses. And probably one where the “urban” planning is less dense than in your standard suburbia.
It will be a very small city by population.
And that leads us to the problem: how do we define “city”?
There are several competing definitions for what constitutes a city, and since we’re talking about cities at the very lowest end of the population scale, you’ll get a big pile of different answers depending on what counts as a city fir whom.
This was my immediate thought too: The city with the largest amount of floor space per person probably won’t qualify as a city on its own
Still valuable to me - it identifies money-flight, e.g are rich people in one town moving to a specific few suburbs instead of staying in the city centre?
We can do it on a per-neighbourhood basis and include things like villages
I still define those as cities, and that’s basically part of what I wanted to identify, actually: which cities are using their space in inefficient ways and are not building in a dense way?
That being said, I have no problem with suburbia if they create actual vibrant gardens instead of lawns (which they never seem to do).
But if you had a statistic you could show to city councils and real estate saying “this area (e.g manhattan) is drawing in more tax than your area because it has people living densely,” you could hopefully change their minds about things.