Oh sorry Google fooled me, when asking for US pop density it answered per sq. mi (96) and for EU it answered per sq km (106). The numbers are less similar with

Oh sorry Google fooled me, when asking for US pop density it answered per sq. mi (96) and for EU it answered per sq km (106). The numbers are less similar with the same units then…. Some sparse countries like Ukraine aren’t counted in EU however. But I think the point you make about Sweden also applies to anywhere. How much land a country has that isn’t a city isn’t very relevant to how its cities look. If the US had 10 more alaskas or the EU had 10 more Swedens wouldn’t matter for how cities are built. In the debate about Covid there was a trope about Sweden being so sparsely populated that no lessons could be drawn from there. Yet looking more closely it’s obvious that this is merely because most areas of Sweden have almost no people, and it’s rather Urbanized. I.e it’s actually locally dense but mostly empty. “Mean distance between humans” is a much better measure of population density, both for city design and epedemics. Australia is a prime example where on average, 3ppl per square kilometer live. A figure that says nothing about actual population density.