
Comparing Urban Footprints (2014) - drgvond
https://geographyeducation.org/articles/comparing-urban-footprints/
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pintxo
The shapes are basically hand-made:

> And now a few words on methodology. As with all maps and statistics, these
> should be taken with several grains of salt. The goal here was to create a
> simple infographic for broad comparative purposes. To create the footprints
> themselves, I used satellite imagery to physically trace the boundaries of
> the built-up area of each city’s greater urban area. These footprints do not
> correspond to administrative boundaries. They are based purely on the divide
> between urban and rural land use. Which, at times, can be a very subjective
> task. I included low density suburban housing tracts within my urban
> footprints (hence the size of the US cities). I included dense built up
> areas which weren’t connected to the main contiguous urban area but were
> within its periphery (examples: Moscow, Frankfurt). I excluded rural areas,
> farmland, villages, or large urban parks. Obviously, simplification was
> necessary.

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ripley12
I love the idea, but the underlying data for the Tokyo region is wrong. The
author seems to have used the population number for Tokyo Metropolis
specifically (13.1M) but the geography for a much larger regional area which
is closer to 30M people.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area)

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aaroninsf
The fuzzy notion of metropolitan area makes this less interesting that it
might be.

An affordance with some crude tiers reflecting administrative layers and de
facto ones, under user control or at least rendered out, would be a 10x
improvement IMO.

As an SF resident the disjoint archipelago standing in for the Bay Area is
wince-inducing.

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PeterSmit
Interesting. The shape of Amsterdam is super weird though. I wonder how the
outline was made.

