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I heard a little nugget the other day that, at its height in the early Roman period, the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500

I heard a little nugget the other day that, at its height in the early Roman period, the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre. Granted, a much higher overall population in the modern city. However, very rarely did buildings in that era reach five stories, and almost none exceeded that height.

bobthepanda 8y ago
Part of it is living standards; even the poorest of the poor in New York generally don't live in the cramped, slumlike conditions of the 1900s. Part of it is household size; the modern household has decreased in size dramatically, now that raising children has moved from "we need as many children as possible so that at least a few of them make it to adulthood" to "giving children a quality life is expensive". A good deal of it is transportation. In 1800 most people walked, and the rich used horses. By 1900 we had railroads and streetcars; by 1920 we had metros; by 1950 we had automobiles. The effect of the automobile has been strongest in America; a single highway interchange in Atlanta takes up as much room as the city of Florence, Italy. https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-side-expressway.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-si...
- derekp7 8y ago
  Ok, something is off with the info in that link. I just looked up Florence Italy on Google maps, and it measures about 5.5 miles across. I couldn't find that exact interchange in the article's picture, so I picked the largest one I saw by eyeballing the map of Atlanta (I85 and I20), and it appears to measure about 2000 feet across.
  - kingaillas 8y ago
    He's using what must be the core downtown area of Florence, Italy. Matching the picture in the post - on google maps, what is bounded by SS67 road on the north side of the Arno river: counterclockwise to Piazza della Liberta and back to the river; and on the south side the road down to Porta Romana and back to the river. That section eyeballs to be around roughly ~1.5 mi across. Larger than 2000 ft but a lot less than 5.5 mi.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    Yeah the author seems to be trying to make some point, but even using a very narrow definition of the city of Florence, and a very expansive view of the interchange, he's practically off by an order of magnitude.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      The interchange image is 5x too wide, and the Florence image is more than 3x too narrow. That's more than an order of magnitude in length. And more than two orders of magnitude in area.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    He appears to be defining "Florence" as "the urban core of Florence," and "Atlanta cloverleaf" as "Atlanta cloverleaf plus a Florence-sized chunk of adjacent land."
    - emj 8y ago
      Highways create alot of dead space that can not be used for other things than really low value stuff. So it's a fair comparision, considering we are talking about walking in a city center vs. people polluting the same size of land
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  > Part of it is living standards; even the poorest of the poor in New York generally don't live in the cramped, slumlike conditions of the 1900s. Living standards affect density, but they're not the reason we can't fit 190 people per acre. Let's say you're in 1900 making 6 story apartment blocks. You could set up a residential district that's 30% road, 20% open space, and 50% building. Make your average apartment be 600 square feet with a 20x12 living room, two 10x12 bedrooms, a 10x6 kitchenette, a 10x6 bathroom, and an occupancy of 3. Probably slightly reshaped for the sake of windows. With some extra space for hallways and stairs, you can reach an average ground impact of 75 square feet per person. That means it only takes a third of an acre to house 190 people, leaving the other 2/3 for businesses. For comparison NYC is currently 75% residential. Such an apartment isn't huge but it's still twice the size of college dorm. These days you could build 3x as high and give each person over twice that much space and have lots of elevators and still fit 200 people into a third of an acre. Rent out the bottom floor to shops too.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    That's if your area only consists of apartments. What about shops? What about schools and required athletic facilities? What about playgrounds and parks? What of hospitals and clinics, or police stations and jails, or fire stations? And can all these workers get to work using the available infrastructure? Until 1961, New York had a zoning code that was concerned with exactly none of those things, and planning for services and basic infrastructure was haphazard at best. While the current zoning code is overly restrictive, it at least prevents growth in places that would not have the services required to handle it. (It also prevents the growth in a lot of other places as well, but that's beside the point.)
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      >That's if your area only consists of apartments. What about shops? What about schools and required athletic facilities? [...] What of hospitals and clinics, or police stations and jails, or fire stations? That's why I looked up how much of the city is residential right now. If you only spend 1/3 of the city on apartments, that leaves you a lot of room for everything else. > What about playgrounds and parks? Oops. I had a thing about making an entire block into a park out of every 3x3 but I lost it in editing. So yes there's lots of room for parks. > And can all these workers get to work using the available infrastructure? The base idea was set in 1900 and housing the same number of people but in better buildings, so yeah they can still get to work. For the idea of fitting more people into the current city, I'm not sure, but it would probably work out. Have more mid-rise housing right next to jobs, and use the tax boost from having more residents to add more mass transit. As far as zoning, the issue is not housing vs. services and infrastructure, it's the size of the housing. Detached houses have an awful use ratio.
chimeracoder 8y ago
> the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre. Manhattan has a density of 72,000 people per square mile. If it were its own city, that would make it the 6th densest city in the world[0]. The top three are Manila and Mumbai, at 108,000, 74,000, and 74,000 people per square mile, respectively. So, regardless of levels of development, modern cities cap out under 80,000 people per square mile, with Manila being a slight outlier (but not by much). 190 people/acre - what you cite for Antioch - is 121,600 people per square mile. I'm not able to find any reputable sources that back that statistic, and estimating populations of cities from antiquity is inherently a bit tricky. 500,000 people would also put it at 50-80% of the population of Rome during the same time period, and more populous that Constantinople, though it's not included in any of the four lists of populations of large cities on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through... [0] There are two more, at 108K and 80K, but they both have populations under 70,000, so they're not comparable.
Retric 8y ago
Mostly that's due to commuters and tourists. Hotels and office buildings take up a lot of space without increasing 'population density'.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

bobthepanda 8y ago

Part of it is living standards; even the poorest of the poor in New York generally don't live in the cramped, slumlike conditions of the 1900s. Part of it is household size; the modern household has decreased in size dramatically, now that raising children has moved from "we need as many children as possible so that at least a few of them make it to adulthood" to "giving children a quality life is expensive". A good deal of it is transportation. In 1800 most people walked, and the rich used horses. By 1900 we had railroads and streetcars; by 1920 we had metros; by 1950 we had automobiles. The effect of the automobile has been strongest in America; a single highway interchange in Atlanta takes up as much room as the city of Florence, Italy. https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-side-expressway.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-si...

derekp7 8y ago
Ok, something is off with the info in that link. I just looked up Florence Italy on Google maps, and it measures about 5.5 miles across. I couldn't find that exact interchange in the article's picture, so I picked the largest one I saw by eyeballing the map of Atlanta (I85 and I20), and it appears to measure about 2000 feet across.
- kingaillas 8y ago
  He's using what must be the core downtown area of Florence, Italy. Matching the picture in the post - on google maps, what is bounded by SS67 road on the north side of the Arno river: counterclockwise to Piazza della Liberta and back to the river; and on the south side the road down to Porta Romana and back to the river. That section eyeballs to be around roughly ~1.5 mi across. Larger than 2000 ft but a lot less than 5.5 mi.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Yeah the author seems to be trying to make some point, but even using a very narrow definition of the city of Florence, and a very expansive view of the interchange, he's practically off by an order of magnitude.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    The interchange image is 5x too wide, and the Florence image is more than 3x too narrow. That's more than an order of magnitude in length. And more than two orders of magnitude in area.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  He appears to be defining "Florence" as "the urban core of Florence," and "Atlanta cloverleaf" as "Atlanta cloverleaf plus a Florence-sized chunk of adjacent land."
  - emj 8y ago
    Highways create alot of dead space that can not be used for other things than really low value stuff. So it's a fair comparision, considering we are talking about walking in a city center vs. people polluting the same size of land
Dylan16807 8y ago
> Part of it is living standards; even the poorest of the poor in New York generally don't live in the cramped, slumlike conditions of the 1900s. Living standards affect density, but they're not the reason we can't fit 190 people per acre. Let's say you're in 1900 making 6 story apartment blocks. You could set up a residential district that's 30% road, 20% open space, and 50% building. Make your average apartment be 600 square feet with a 20x12 living room, two 10x12 bedrooms, a 10x6 kitchenette, a 10x6 bathroom, and an occupancy of 3. Probably slightly reshaped for the sake of windows. With some extra space for hallways and stairs, you can reach an average ground impact of 75 square feet per person. That means it only takes a third of an acre to house 190 people, leaving the other 2/3 for businesses. For comparison NYC is currently 75% residential. Such an apartment isn't huge but it's still twice the size of college dorm. These days you could build 3x as high and give each person over twice that much space and have lots of elevators and still fit 200 people into a third of an acre. Rent out the bottom floor to shops too.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  That's if your area only consists of apartments. What about shops? What about schools and required athletic facilities? What about playgrounds and parks? What of hospitals and clinics, or police stations and jails, or fire stations? And can all these workers get to work using the available infrastructure? Until 1961, New York had a zoning code that was concerned with exactly none of those things, and planning for services and basic infrastructure was haphazard at best. While the current zoning code is overly restrictive, it at least prevents growth in places that would not have the services required to handle it. (It also prevents the growth in a lot of other places as well, but that's beside the point.)
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    >That's if your area only consists of apartments. What about shops? What about schools and required athletic facilities? [...] What of hospitals and clinics, or police stations and jails, or fire stations? That's why I looked up how much of the city is residential right now. If you only spend 1/3 of the city on apartments, that leaves you a lot of room for everything else. > What about playgrounds and parks? Oops. I had a thing about making an entire block into a park out of every 3x3 but I lost it in editing. So yes there's lots of room for parks. > And can all these workers get to work using the available infrastructure? The base idea was set in 1900 and housing the same number of people but in better buildings, so yeah they can still get to work. For the idea of fitting more people into the current city, I'm not sure, but it would probably work out. Have more mid-rise housing right next to jobs, and use the tax boost from having more residents to add more mass transit. As far as zoning, the issue is not housing vs. services and infrastructure, it's the size of the housing. Detached houses have an awful use ratio.

chimeracoder 8y ago

> the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre. Manhattan has a density of 72,000 people per square mile. If it were its own city, that would make it the 6th densest city in the world[0]. The top three are Manila and Mumbai, at 108,000, 74,000, and 74,000 people per square mile, respectively. So, regardless of levels of development, modern cities cap out under 80,000 people per square mile, with Manila being a slight outlier (but not by much). 190 people/acre - what you cite for Antioch - is 121,600 people per square mile. I'm not able to find any reputable sources that back that statistic, and estimating populations of cities from antiquity is inherently a bit tricky. 500,000 people would also put it at 50-80% of the population of Rome during the same time period, and more populous that Constantinople, though it's not included in any of the four lists of populations of large cities on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through... [0] There are two more, at 108K and 80K, but they both have populations under 70,000, so they're not comparable.

Retric 8y ago

Mostly that's due to commuters and tourists. Hotels and office buildings take up a lot of space without increasing 'population density'.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]