18 June 2012

HOW MUCH SPACE DO SUBURBS WASTE?

Having come from the sprawling suburb of Pickering, I often wonder, considering how much denser Toronto is, how much space in Toronto would it take to contain the population of Pickering? That is, just how spatially wasteful is Pickering versus Toronto? With the former exemplifying suburban sprawl and the latter urban density, here is a brief examination I did using the populations, areas, and population densities of Pickering, Old Toronto, and, for a particularly dramatic comparison, Manhattan. Initial statistics perfunctorily acquired from Wikipedia and (at least mostly) from 2011 data.

PICKERING
Population: 89,000
Area: 232 km²
Density: 383/km²

OLD TORONTO
Population: 737,000
Area: 97 km²
Density: 7,584/km²

MANHATTAN
Population: 1,586,000
Area: 60 km²
Density: 27,400/km²


PICKERING TO OLD TORONTO
-20 times as many people live in 1 km² in Old Toronto than in Pickering
-8 Pickerings’ worth of people live in Old Toronto’s area, occupying only 42% as much space as Pickering
-12 km² could house Pickering’s population if it lived as densely as Old Toronto’s, instead of 232 km², or 5% as much space
-1,763,000 people could live in Pickering if it was as dense as Old Toronto
-32,211 people would live in Old Toronto if it was as dense as Pickering, or only 5% as many people; 704,789 people would be displaced

PICKERING TO MANHATTAN
-72 times as many people live in 1 km² in Manhattan than in Pickering
-18 Pickerings’ worth of people live in Manhattan’s area, occupying only 26% as much space as Pickering
-3.25 km² could house Pickering’s population if it lived as densely as Manhattan’s, instead of 232 km², or 1.4% as much space
-6,133,000 people could live in Pickering if it was as dense as Manhattan
-23,017 people would live in Manhattan if it was as dense as Pickering, or only 1.5% as many people; 1,562,983 people would be displaced

4 comments:

  1. I wonder how the numbers would change if you only included the areas in each jurisdiction that are zoned residential. Pickering has a tonne of farmland and other very sparsely populated greenspace that probably shouldn't count towards the calculation, but at the same time Old Toronto has a lot of commercial space that also doesn't actually house residents (I've never been to Manhattan and I don't know a lot about its commercial/residential organisation).
    I think that using the word "waste" to refer to any area that doesn't house people also doesn't consider the value of greenspace or the need for adequate supporting infrastructure and businesses. That terminology suggests that all other factors don't matter, the only important point is that the more densely we populate any given area, the better off we will be. This isn't the case for obvious reasons.
    But all that said, I fully agree that the suburbs are a waste of space, infrastructure, oil, et cetera.

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  2. Yeah, maybe I should put a disclaimer, but I realise this is a fairly simplistic analysis of “waste” in general, since I more specifically am referring to where-most-people-live space, as opposed to farm land. We should try calculating the numbers when accounting for non-residential space. I don't know how we'd subtract the farm space from Pickering data though, for instance.

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  3. GIS data would probably work. I don't know if there would be any that's open source, but I'll bet we know somebody who does!

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  4. I could do that shiznit in a second! But it'll have to be a different second.

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