comparing cities by size

[Frank]

hi,

is there any place on the net where one can
graphically compare various cities by sizes
without much hassle?

i mean like comparing the shape of nyc and
the one of new dehli and similar. the type of
visual comparison one would like to have for
a "berlin fits seven times into the greater tokyo
area" statement.

anyone? thx for an hint!

bye


frank



http://tvc15.blogs.com/

[John Mayson]

All I can think of is use Wikipedia and look at population and area and
make comparisions. That might be more work than you're looking to do (I
can imagine if you want to look up dozens Wikipedia would be a painful way
to do it).

[unknown]

Post by Frank
hi,
is there any place on the net where one can
graphically compare various cities by sizes
without much hassle?
i mean like comparing the shape of nyc and
the one of new dehli and similar. the type of
visual comparison one would like to have for
a "berlin fits seven times into the greater tokyo
area" statement.
anyone? thx for an hint!
bye
frank
http://tvc15.blogs.com/

You could try Google Earth or Gepgraphy Network to see if there is anything
simple there. You may also fing a friendly ear at comp.infosystems.gis (or
you may be ignored if it is not "GIS-y" enough.

[George Conklin]

Frank, there is a very vast literaure in sociology and criminology journals
on city size and crime rates. The best work is done by Ken Land, who has
received numerous prizes in mathematical sociology. In short, size and
density do increase the rates, even when complex mathmatical models are
employed. You would need university access for JSTOR to get the articles
for free. There are regional variations and of course age variables and so
forth and so on. My work in this area was published about 20 years ago, and
was based on international data. But density did raise homicide rates.

Post by unknown

Post by Frank
hi,
is there any place on the net where one can
graphically compare various cities by sizes
without much hassle?
i mean like comparing the shape of nyc and
the one of new dehli and similar. the type of
visual comparison one would like to have for
a "berlin fits seven times into the greater tokyo
area" statement.
anyone? thx for an hint!
bye
frank
http://tvc15.blogs.com/

You could try Google Earth or Gepgraphy Network to see if there is anything
simple there. You may also fing a friendly ear at comp.infosystems.gis (or
you may be ignored if it is not "GIS-y" enough.

[Pat]

Post by Frank
hi,
is there any place on the net where one can
graphically compare various cities by sizes
without much hassle?
i mean like comparing the shape of nyc and
the one of new dehli and similar. the type of
visual comparison one would like to have for
a "berlin fits seven times into the greater tokyo
area" statement.
anyone? thx for an hint!
bye
frank
http://tvc15.blogs.com/

Without regard to shape, but strickly by size, the Census gives the
size of cities, villages, counties and county-subdivisions. Realize
that most cities are county-subdivisions but NYC is not -- it is multi-
county. You can also look things up by "place", which might be your
best measure (depending on what you are doing).

As for "foreign" statistics, I have not idea but if you can find a
Gazetteer it might have most of it.

As for shape, shape is a particularly hard thing to "measure". Just
because city X is 3X the size of city Y, it doesn't not necessarily
mean that you could physically fit city Y into city X.

[Frank]

thank you all for your suggestions!

the shape is vital for my task, i want to "see" how
certain cities "fit" into other cities shapes. so maybe
something via google earth will work best. iŽve seen
such comparisons in news magazines in the past, i
want to play around with those comparisons.

bye


frank



http://tvc15.blogs.com/

[Pat]

Post by Frank
thank you all for your suggestions!
the shape is vital for my task, i want to "see" how
certain cities "fit" into other cities shapes. so maybe
something via google earth will work best. i´ve seen
such comparisons in news magazines in the past, i
want to play around with those comparisons.
bye
frank
http://tvc15.blogs.com/

I guess I don't really understand your question. Say you have city A
and it's a circle with a radius of 1. You have city B and it's a
circle with a radius of 3. You could "fit" 5 of city A into city B in
a simple pattern of 3 across and one each on top and bottom. But in
reality, city B is over 9 times the size of city A -- but you can't
fit 9 circles in city B. I hope that makes sense.

If you have access to a GIS system, you'll have access to boundary
data which would let you pick out the outline of a city. You could do
some bi-variant statistical models that would give you some feel for
how much cities are shaped like each other, but you are getting into
big number-crunching pretty fast. Every do bi-variant statistics --
it's not fun.

If you are just cutting and pasting, the Census will give you a simple
map of any geography that it has down to the BG level.

If you wanted to be really cude (and crude) you could take something
like DeLorme's Street Atlas software and find you city. Save the map
as a .PDF. Take the .PDF into Photoshop (or Gimp or any good photo
software) and create a new layer. On the new layor you could hand-
trace the outline of the city at whatever detail you care to. The
delete the underlying layer and have an outline of the city. If you
did it in a drawing program (instead of a photo program), you could
probably make it into vector data instead of raster data and that
would help with some of the scaling issues.

Another option would be to spring for a small digitizing tablet and
digitize the outlines of the cities from paper maps.

Anyway, good luck with your project.

[Tadej Brezina]

Post by Frank
hi,
is there any place on the net where one can
graphically compare various cities by sizes
without much hassle?
i mean like comparing the shape of nyc and
the one of new dehli and similar. the type of
visual comparison one would like to have for
a "berlin fits seven times into the greater tokyo
area" statement.

Some "little different" things come to my mind:
1. There ist Alain Bertauds Homepage www.alain-bertaud.com, which hosts
many of his papers, some of them have the 3D-profiles of pop. density
over shape;
2. There's this book:
K. Humpert, K. Brenner and S. Becker (2002); Fundamental Principles of
Urban Growth; Wuppertal, Verlag Müller + Busmann
including detailed mathematical analyses of shapes, sizes and others for
57 cities worldwide;
3. Google Earth si not practical at all for this thing as it doesn't
provide perimeter or boundary data. But of course you could do the job
of drawing city limits (physical) according to the digital images.
But that might be hassle extraordinaire;
4. Using a GIS system and probably finding some shape data sets on the
net (don't know, if possible?) could be the quickest for your task;

Good luck
Tadej

[Frank]

great!

bye


frank



http://tvc15.blogs.com/

[j***@comcast.net]

Post by Frank
hi,
is there any place on the net where one can
graphically compare various cities by sizes
without much hassle?
i mean like comparing the shape of nyc and
the one of new dehli and similar. the type of
visual comparison one would like to have for
a "berlin fits seven times into the greater tokyo
area" statement.
anyone? thx for an hint!
bye
frank
http://tvc15.blogs.com/

Cities can easly be compared statistically by size and how the the
statistical characteristics of cities change with size.

A very good article on this technique is at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Geoffrey+West&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

The title of the paper is:

"Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities"

Luís M. A. Bettencourt*†, Jose´ Lobo‡, Dirk Helbing§, Christian Ku¨
hnert§, and Geoffrey B. West*¶
*Theoretical Division, MS B284, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los
Alamos, NM 87545; ‡Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State
University,
P.O. Box 873211, Tempe, AZ 85287-3211; §Institute for Transport and
Economics, Dresden University of Technology, Andreas-Schubert-Strasse
23,
D-01062 Dresden, Germany; and ¶Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park
Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501

Table 1 in this paper shows a lot of comparisons between statistical
chararacteristics of different size cities. This is all done with
"Power Law" statistics which is really the only valid way of
charcterizing cities. The statistics are a continuous distribution
with no discontinuities to for example to cluster data into cities,
suburbs, etc .

[george conklin]

Post by Frank
hi,
is there any place on the net where one can
graphically compare various cities by sizes
without much hassle?
i mean like comparing the shape of nyc and
the one of new dehli and similar. the type of
visual comparison one would like to have for
a "berlin fits seven times into the greater tokyo
area" statement.
anyone? thx for an hint!
bye
frank
http://tvc15.blogs.com/

Cities can easly be compared statistically by size and how the the
statistical characteristics of cities change with size.

A very good article on this technique is at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Geoffrey+West&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

The title of the paper is:

"Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities"

Luís M. A. Bettencourt*†, JoseŽ Lobo‡, Dirk Helbing§, Christian Kuš
hnert§, and Geoffrey B. West*¶
*Theoretical Division, MS B284, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los
Alamos, NM 87545; ‡Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State
University,
P.O. Box 873211, Tempe, AZ 85287-3211; §Institute for Transport and
Economics, Dresden University of Technology, Andreas-Schubert-Strasse
23,
D-01062 Dresden, Germany; and ¶Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park
Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501

Table 1 in this paper shows a lot of comparisons between statistical
chararacteristics of different size cities. This is all done with
"Power Law" statistics which is really the only valid way of
charcterizing cities. The statistics are a continuous distribution
with no discontinuities to for example to cluster data into cities,
suburbs, etc .

---

There is NO need to break cities down into rigid size categories.

[e***@gmail.com]

I think you are looking for something we often do in our office, which
is to compare the scale of a mapped area with another using Google
Earth Map Underlays.

What usually works well for us is using an underlay .png map outline
of the area to compare to, then move it around Google Earth.