Posts Tagged ‘urban studies’
“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange”*…
How did cities emerge? Where were they located? How did they change over the course of human civilization? How did they change their surroundings?
The answers to these questions are available, but hard to access. The United Nations World Urbanization Prospects, for example, only tracks urban populations and their locations from 1950 on, and so offers only a small, relatively recent snapshot of urbanization. The work of the historian Tertius Chandler and the political scientist George Modelski is much more extensive. The two painstakingly gathered population and archeological records from as far back as 2250 B.C. The problem, however, is that their data exist in the form of tables that are stuffed with hard-to-decipher numbers and notes.
A new paper published in Scientific Data takes a stab at mapping the information Chandler and Modelski gathered. Yale University researcher Meredith Reba and her colleagues digitized, transcribed, and geocoded over 6,000 years of urban data…
More at “Mapping 6,000 Years of Urban Settlements.”
* Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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As we take it downtown, we might recall that it was on this date in 455 CE that the Vandals completed their sack of Rome. Three years earlier, the Vandal king Genseric and the Roman Emperor Valentinian III, had betrothed their children, Huneric and Eudocia, to strengthen their then-new peace treaty, but had delayed the wedding, as Eudocia was only 5 at the time. But on the 16th of March in 455, Valentinian was assassinated, and Petronius Maximus rose to the throne. Petronius, more concerned to consolidate power than to observe the decencies, married Valentinian’s widow, Licinia Eudoxia, and had his son Palladius marry Eudocia. Genseric was not amused; he sailed immediately with his army to Rome. The Vandals knocked down the city’s aqueducts on their way to the gates– which were opened to the invaders after Genseric agreed to Pope Leo I‘s request that he not raze the city nor murder it’s inhabits wholesale. The Vandals satisfied themselves with treasure and with a group of “hostages” including Eudocia and her mother. Petronius Maximus and Palladius had killed by an angry Roman mob before Genseric arrived.
How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm?…
Urban Density “Shadow”
TOKYO: Population 42,607,376 – Area 7,408 km² – Density 5,752 pp/km²
From Cotonou in Benin, with just more than 1.5 million people, to the Tokyo metropolitan region, with more than 42 million inhabitants, a total population of 1.2 billion people– 35 per cent of the world’s urban population in 2010– live in one of 129 ‘extended metropolitan regions’ across the world. LSECities has taken a closer look:
Using Google Earth satellite imagery, we captured a ‘snapshot’ of where people live and estimated ‘net densities’ by systematically tracing the built-up area of each metropolitan region – including central zones, satellite towns and the peripheral areas (a detailed methodology can be found online). The fact that 23 million people in Manila occupy a space one eighth the size of the same number of New Yorkers, or that Atlanta in the USA is 25 times larger than Hong Kong with roughly the same population, says something about the capacity and resilience of urban form as well as physical and geographical constraints…
Explore further at LSECities’ “Measuring the World’s Urban Footprint.”
[TotH to Flowing Data]
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As we hail a cab, we might recall that it was on this date in 1864 that Union General William T. Sherman ordered residents of Atlanta, Georgia, to evacuate the city. Sherman had taken Atlanta with little effort, and had promptly destroyed rail lines that might connect the city with Southern reinforcements. Preparing to march on, Sherman didn’t want to be responsible for the civilian population of the city, so decided to evict them: from September 11- 16, 446 families, about 1,600 people, left their homes and possessions and were “dropped” by Sherman’s men far south of the city, in the vicinity of the remains of the defeated army of Confederate General John Bell Hood. In November Sherman and his men, having resupplied themselves with the goods that remained in Atlanta set out on their infamous “March to the Sea,” destroying nearly everything that lay in their path.
Sherman’s men destroying rail lines in Atlanta at the time of the evacuation order
ATLANTA TODAY: Population 7,506,267 – Area 6,888 km² – Density 1,090 pp/km²
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