How Suburban Are Big American Cities?

The sampling is wrong. Picking the largest municipalities isn't picking the largest cities; it's picking the regions with the best political organization. Jacksonville proper has about twice as many people as Miami proper, but you'd be insane to say Jacksonville is a "larger city": Miami's core is way denser and the metro area is four times as populated. Similarly, putting San Jose on the list instead of San Francisco doesn't make any sense. You could include northern San Mateo county and Oakland (which adds up to 1.5M) as "San Francisco" and you'd still get a higher ratio than in San Jose. Cities whose boundaries sprawl are concurrently more suburban and more populous: that's confounding.

A better list would be: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Miami, Dallas.

The methodology here doesn't seem particularly useful— they say Seattle is seen as 90% urban, but apparently 40% of streets in city limits don't have proper sidewalks: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/giving-everyone-a-s...

Probably because most people define 'urban' and 'suburban' in relative terms, and a neighborhood that might well be 'suburban' by NYC terms is 'urban' by the Seattle definition. Or a 3000sqft. house on an acre lot in Orlando can be 'downtown'.

That's one of those typical statistical fallacies. Depending on how you define 'urban' even Los Angeles (one huge blob of suburbia) suddenly becomes "Los Angeles — despite its reputation for sprawl — is 87 percent urban."

Seriously now?

Seemed cool until you look into the details - they gathered the data by asking residents if they lived in a "urban, suburban or rural" area.

How many people who live within a city's limits are really going to say they live in the suburbs?

This was an interesting visualization. Nothing wrong with it as long as you understand what is being measured, but I think it does leave out degrees of density in very urban areas. Chicago and New York are both 100% urban, and that does indeed tell you something, but there's still an interesting measurement to take above the threshold used here for what qualifies as "urban".

I actually find this review more revealing:

http://beyonddc.com/?p=4808

These maps show distinctions at very high density levels, so you'd see not only how Chicago differs from New York, but distinctions within these cities at a very high level of density.

I dunno, Staten Island is pretty suburban. Same with parts of Queens. Hell, parts of Brooklyn have streets upon streets of single family homes with large yards that wouldn't look out of place in quaint Connecticut towns.

The Houston graphic is interesting. Conroe is actually quite rural. The Woodlands, however, is shown as being a smaller area, but it's very densely populated, being one of the prime places for Houstonians to move to.

As others (and the article itself) note, first define a "city." Is it the arbitrary, and very political boundaries (of which each state, at least in the US has various and different rules how cities come to be, annexation, etc.)

For fun go google "world's largest cities". I guarantee you will get a different answer depending on the source, because each source defines a city differently. Of course there will be some overlap (Tokyo will be up there, along with a few other cities, but there is a rather large amount of variation). How can we not come to a consensus over something that seems so relatively easy to figure out? How difficult is it to count people in a city?

Again, what is a city? The political boundary? Is it the metro area? What type of metro area? The parts in which people commute to the center of "the" city for work? The surrounding counties that have economic ties to the "central" county? (This is roughly how the Census Bureau defines Metropolitan Statistical Areas, even though parts of the counties will have connections, but other parts of the counties will not). The urban area only? Pick whatever you want to call the city, just be consistent.

Let's say we go with a metro area, because it's more true of what a "city" is than the rather simple political boundaries. Which is most likely going to include if not other towns and cities, at least exurban areas that (economically if nothing else) act like an independent towns, and all manner of other interesting urban/non-urban forms of land use with people that all surround some sort of central place.

Let's say that you've defined your geographic area that constitutes a city.

Now let's get to the very difficult problem of defining the differences between urban, suburban and rural.

One of the more common answers to define "urban" is "population density," but then of course you must create a threshold for what constitutes high population and urban and what isn't. Are we talking about daytime population (workers) or nighttime population (residents)? Because there are still a major number of cities who's downtown will cease to exist after 5pm.

But defining what is center city/urban is actually not too terribly difficult, it's defining the edge cases that it becomes a difficult question. Where does the urban end and suburban begin? In most cities that are quickly growing, the old inner ring suburbs are now becoming quite urban in character. Old rural lands are now suburban. But where does one end and the other begin?

It's one of those things, like porn, you know it when you see it. You can probably point to one area and say "that's urban." "That's rural." But you (and me, and others) will all have slightly different definitions that while most will overlap, we will always disagree on the cases that could be both urban/suburban, suburban/rural or even (like parts of Detroit now) urban/rural.

If you can do all that, please give me a call, because congratulations, you're probably going to get nominated for a nobel prize in economics for precisely defining a city as well as coming up with a generalizable and replicable form of defining urban/suburban and rural.

(I could go on and on, but I won't but for extra fun, go read up on the Spersopolis. https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sgo/summary/v035/35.2.hart.htm... )