density

Over 200 attendees joined our panelist for a webinar hosted by Urban Reform Institute on December 4. If you missed the event, you can watch the video below:  read more »

Population density may sound like the most mundane of metrics, a column heading in a city planner’s spreadsheet, but in cities across the U.S. it’s been a source of cultural controversy, guiding where people move and why.  read more »

Analyst Phil Hayward of Wellington, New Zealand provides a provocative perspective on why urban intensification (densification in the urban cores) is incapable of compensating for the huge house price increases attributable to urban containment boundaries.  read more »

Atlantic Cities reports on research indicating an association between suicide and lower density, in an article entitled “The Unsettling Link Between Sprawl and Suicide.” Actually, there’s no reason to be unsettled, at least with respect to urban areas and their densities. The conclusions apply to rural areas, not urban areas.  read more »

The Province in Vancouver reports (in "15% of downtown Vancouver condos sit empty, turning areas into ghost towns: Study") that "much of the downtown core is starting to look like B.C.’s ghost towns — with apartments languishing empty, businesses closing down and residents not feeling the sense of community they bought into." The study, by University of British Columbia (UBC) planning professor Andy Yan, indicate  read more »

Jim Russell pointed me at an interesting article about densification vs. de-densification over at the Urbanization Project at NYU Stern. It contains this very interesting map of the change in census tract densities in Manhattan over the century between 1910 and 2010:  read more »

Differing views on the future of California urban areas are the subject of a California Senate Republican Caucus report (Briefing Report: Attack On The Suburbs: SB 375 And Its Effects On The Housing Market).  read more »

Editor Sommer Mathis over at The Atlantic Cities has taken to making stuff up. In a recent post she reported on a dispute in the city of Seattle over minimum parking requirements relating to multi-unit buildings. She said:  read more »

We are used to dealing with jurisdictional boundaries when assessing and comparing cities. These are often either municipal areas or metropolitan statistical areas (which are based on entire counties). But these can have little relevance to the amount of area in a given city-region that is actually urban in nature. This makes apples to apples across regions difficult.  read more »

This morning the US Bureau of the Census released data for urban areas in the United States. The urban population of the US rose to 249.3 million in 2010, out of a total population of 308.7 million. Urbanization covered 106,000 square miles, representing 3.0 percent of the US land mass. Overall urban density was 2,342 per square mile (905 per square kilometer).  read more »