
The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box - fanf2
https://blog.plover.com/2020/06/24/#boundary-conditions
======
ronyfadel
I'm currently working on a project that involves dataviz & mapping, and one of
the things I've discovered along the way was WikiData's SPARQL query engine.

Mind = blown.

You can basically ask Wiki(pedia) almost anything you can think of (including
the largest city in a bounding box) using the same query language.

Examples:

\- Largest cities per country ([https://w.wiki/UC4](https://w.wiki/UC4))

\- Cities connected by the European route E40
([https://w.wiki/74E](https://w.wiki/74E))

\- Streets in France named after a woman
([https://w.wiki/34K](https://w.wiki/34K))

~~~
philshem
You can even request a query from the community:

[https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query](https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query)

~~~
ronyfadel
That's handy! To be honest, SPARQL is definitely not easy to use.

~~~
leipert
I have worked with SPARQL professionally. The biggest problem: Quality if the
data. Yes it is amazing, but if stuff is missing annotations, it is hard to
get meaningful results.

~~~
chaps
This was my experience also. It's bad enough that it's effectively useless and
requires _extensive_ validation.

------
caf
I quibble with the description of the shapes bounded by 10 degrees of
longitude and latitude as "rectangles" \- they're not even planar shapes, and
their adjacent sides certainly aren't at right angles. Some of them don't even
have four sides.

This bears considering when looking at the map, because some of those regions
are much, much smaller than others.

~~~
tantalor
> their adjacent sides certainly aren't at right angles

They certainly are. Parallels and meridians always meet at 90 degrees.

[https://www.geogebra.org/m/kNtNZzsS](https://www.geogebra.org/m/kNtNZzsS)

~~~
doersino
Right angles with regard to the latitude-longitude coordinate system, but not
with regard to the surface of the earth. Recall that all meridians intersect
at the poles.

~~~
tantalor
Yes with regard to the surface of the earth.

Take the lines tangent to the meridian & parallel at the point of
intersection. Observe these lines are perpendicular. Hence the meridian &
parallel meet at a right angle.

~~~
simonh
What about the ‘boxes’ where the top edge is, er, the point at one of the
poles?

~~~
tantalor
Yeah not the pole of course, but you can cut them off at at ±89.999 degrees
and it still works.

------
foota
I think something more interesting might be like a voronoi diagram of all
cities such that the city is in like the top 5 within a 1000 miles radius or
something (or just that but without the voronoi part). This should preserve
the fact that only the largest cities in some area are present, but eliminate
the arbitrariness of the boundaries. I think you would want to compute this
with a sweep line algorithm.

~~~
incompatible
A map projection that preserves area would be better, otherwise there's an
excessive number of cities in the far northern hemisphere, and a lack of
detail in the tropics.

~~~
toxik
Meanwhile, neither Sweden’s nor Norway’s capital is in the map. But two
smaller Norwegian cities are.

I think this just teaches you the issue with discretization.

~~~
ewendel
There are in fact five small Norwegian towns on this map.

Vadsø, Hammerfest, Trondheim, Bergen and Longyearbyen.

~~~
runarberg
Denmark has a funnier case. There are 6 cities/town within the Kingdom of
Denmark with 0 of them in Denmark. (5 in Greenland and 1 in The Faeroe
Islands; Iceland belonging to the Kingdom until 1944 has 2)

------
jl6
I wonder if London could be the largest city in _two_ boxes. The zero meridian
line goes through Greenwich, which leaves most of London in the western box,
but a still sizeable chunk of East London in the eastern box.

Is East London bigger than Hamburg?

Are there any other large cities that straddle the bounding boxes?

~~~
colourgarden
Brussels (c.1.2m) and Cologne (c.1.1m) are both in that box, I believe.

It seems the population of the parts of Greater London east of the Meridian is
something around one million[1] so it would be close.

1\.
[https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/greaterlondon/](https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/greaterlondon/)

------
allengeorge
I’m fairly sure Toronto is larger than Chicago...

EDIT: Yeah, back in 2013:
[https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2013/03/05/torontos_p...](https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2013/03/05/torontos_population_overtakes_chicago.html)
\- and I’m pretty sure it’s almost at or crossed the 3M mark (COVID may have
tossed a wrench in the latter).

Ah. It’s because Toronto is in the same box as _New York_ - my bad!

~~~
griffinkelly
Chicago is having significant population loss, so that gap will only grow. I
believe Houston is about to pass Chicago.

~~~
hellofunk
Why is Chicago losing people?

~~~
tristor
Many reasons, but probably the biggest one is social shifts causing an overall
degradation of city life resulting in people leaving. When the Chicago Board
of Trade ended floor trading a significant amount of large finance companies
moved elsewhere, some relocated to Dallas, some reduced staffing/office space
and had principle officers in NYC already.

There's a lot of conversations about cities in the Midwest simply not
happening, even though critical decay is occurring. St. Louis is another
example of a city where they were doing very well for awhile and had a strong
aerospace/telecom/manufacturing/tech sector and the city has now decayed
dramatically to the point many businesses have pulled out and crime rates have
skyrocketed. St Louis and Chicago are both more dangerous cities than Detroit,
and all the available evidence points to violence being primarily a
socioeconomic issue rather than an issue of any other factors.

~~~
lotsofpulp
If you’re looking for somewhere to invest, anywhere in the bottom of these
lists will make it much harder to earn a decent ROI due to a higher taxes to
government services ratio compared to places higher on the lists. Chicago
unfortunately is at the bottom of both lists.

[https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-
stat...](https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-state-of-the-
states-2019)
[https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/2020-financial...](https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/2020-financial-
state-of-the-cities)

------
vikramkr
A lot of comments about metros areas and the like, such as how Jacksonville
shows up because of city limits being larger than atlanta, but if you start
getting I to trying to define what a city's metro area is, you run into a lot
of issues with giant powerful cities like NY. Can you really count the
population of Newark, New Jersey as part of NYC, NY? Even though newark is
firmly within the NYC metro area, it's a separate city in a different state
with it's own government etc. And what do you do about the bay? Is San
Francisco part of san Jose? What about twin cities, like dallas and fort
worth? This probably makes the most sense as a way of doing this map since at
least it's clear cut.

~~~
thescriptkiddie
One way to work around the arbitrariness of city limits would be to only count
the population living within a fixed distance of the city center. I would
suggest 5 or 6 km, which is approximately the distance that your can
comfortably walk in 1 hour, and also (perhaps not coincidentally) the
approximate radius of Paris. This would get you a list of dense cities, which
is probably what people are imagining when they thing of "large" cities.

Another way would be to count everyone as part of the population of whatever
city they are physically closest to, without regard to political boundaries.
But this would probably just get you a list of sprawling metropolitan areas.

~~~
bitslayer
A good way to define metropolitan areas is by commuter patterns. If a certain
percentage of residents of a county or town all commute to the same adjoining
larger town, then that gets counted.

------
mytailorisrich
Guangzhou is usually reported as larger than Shenzhen.

A specific issue with the population of Chinese cities, though, is that the
administrative 'city' division in China can be quite larger than what might be
expected in the West.

~~~
horsawlarway
a lot these are pretty bad representations of real population, even in the US.

ex: Jacksonville is listed as the largest city in the southeast, and strictly
speaking, this is true because it's a fairly dense population area. But it's a
pretty misleading statement to say that it's the largest city.

Jacksonville's metro population is only about 1.5 million.

Atlanta is in the same box and Atlanta's metro population is nearly 4 times
larger (5.9 million), Nashville also beats Jacksonville (1.9 million)

~~~
mc32
To me that’s not misleading in that they count city proper rather than metro
areas.

Both have their places, but I wouldn’t say one is more misleading than the
other. One is administrative and one is more demographic.

~~~
ghaff
And they both go to show that statements/calculations about things like urban
density are heavily influenced by historically and culturally determined
political boundaries and definitions. Even look at the US Census Bureau 80%
urban metric that a lot of people like to quote. Lots of small towns with
farmlands and orchards (like where I live) are "urban" by this particular
definition. And they _are_ "urban" relative to truly rural Wyoming. But
they're not urban in the sense of having any of the attributes of a dense city
center.

~~~
hpkuarg
There must be a way to come up with an (almost) universally applicable metric
of city-ness, regardless of the adminstrative boundaries, that can be applied
to situations like this map. Something like, the area in which the population
density is above a certain threshold, and the population that lives in that
area.

~~~
ghaff
FiveThirtyEight has done some work in that area for purposes of splitting
urban/rural from a political perspective. The article also mentions a couple
other examples of something similar.

[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-
is-y...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-is-your-
state-and-what-does-that-mean-for-the-2020-election/)

------
nathancahill
Used to live on Baseline Rd. It originally split Nebraska Territory to the
north and Kansas Territory to the south, originally surveyed in 1859. The
Colorado territory wasn't formed until two years later in 1861. (Utah
territory originally began somewhere in the Rockies beyond Boulder).

------
blueblisters
TIL Atlanta, GA has fewer people than Jacksonville, FL. The Atlanta
metropolitan area has a lot more people.

~~~
l72
This is the problem with how we define cities. Jacksonville is technically the
largest city in all of Florida too, but that is because it annexed almost all
of its suburbs, so the whole "metro" area is just on city, which is quite
different then most other American cities.

~~~
AshleyGrant
Jacksonville is the largest city by land area in the continental United
States, not just Florida.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20021017211112/http://www.census...](https://web.archive.org/web/20021017211112/http://www.census.gov/statab/ccdb/cit1010r.txt)

~~~
js2
But it's very sparsely populated, not even in the top 100:

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

------
xwdv
What would be awesome is if you can take a grid like this and then drag it to
create an offset and change in subtle ways what cities appear in the boxes.

This could be the beginning of something like a gerrymandering tool.

------
oefrha
Spotted a factual mistake immediately:

> There is a Chinese version of this. The Chinese cities on the map include
> the big Chinese cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Chengdu.
> Shenyang. A couple of cities in Mongolia, analogous to the appearance of
> Winnipeg on the U.S. map.

Baotou and Hohhot are both Inner Mongolian cities, i.e. Chinese cities.

~~~
mjd
Thank you for pointing this out. I will correct it.

(edit: Fixed. Thanks again.)

~~~
oefrha
No problem!

~~~
mjd
I really like the idea of Idaho and Montana as the Inner Mongolia of the
United States.

Clearly, Mongolia itself is analogous to Canada.

~~~
oefrha
Yeah, definitely some parallel there, though Canada is more like Mongolia and
Siberia combined.

------
Waterluvian
I love how this says something about the biases that exist in making legible
maps. Toronto isn’t even shown.

Any time to read a map, remember that at different scales, there’s an
editorial opinion, whether direct or algorithmic, on what you see.

~~~
chrisoverzero
It’s not particularly biased to say that New York is larger than Toronto, in
my opinion.

~~~
allengeorge
I think the OP got confused - as I did - on the position of Toronto on the
lakes. We both didn’t realize that Toronto is in the same box as New York.

~~~
Waterluvian
I’m not confused. That’s my point. That Toronto is a big city and the rules
defining how this map gets symbolized makes it invisible.

~~~
jobigoud
It's like saying Pluto is a big planet. It may be true but there is a bigger
one nearby that make it invisible if your map is about the biggest in the
neighborhood.

------
wahlis
This could serve as a good example of how politicians manipulate voting areas
to ensure majorities. The results are probably correct, but the result is
misleading.

~~~
hliyan
Gerrymandering was the very first thing that popped into my head when I
noticed the most populace city in my country lose out to what's basically a
town because it ended up on a grid with another country's city. I nearly
started a "that's clearly a mistake" comment before realizing what had
happened.

------
allard
Niue isn't a city (nor village). It's a country.

~~~
ivanche
Ah, the famous country which has Pokemon, Disney, Star Wars etc. characters
embossed at their national currency coins [1].

[1] [https://www.procaffenation.com/niue-currency-cartoon-
coins/](https://www.procaffenation.com/niue-currency-cartoon-coins/)

------
pretendgeneer
I was surprised by Leonora, Western Australia being there with it's population
of 556 [1], I tried to find a bigger town in the area but couldn't.

I wonder if that is the smallest town on that map?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora,_Western_Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora,_Western_Australia)

~~~
cosminratiu
Alert in northern Canada has 62 permanent inhabitants, according to wikipedia
[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut)

~~~
AMerrit
I had a friend who worked up in Alert while he was in the air force. It may be
one of the most remote places on the map, it's essentially an out grown air
force base/research station, there would be nothing there if not for the cold
war.

------
milkytron
Interesting map!

What I found particularly interesting is that Fort Collins (in Colorado) was
the largest city in it's block with a population of only 167k people. Just
goes to show how sparsely populated that region is around Wyoming/Northern
CO/Montana.

~~~
perrygeo
And a good example of why the 10 degree grid is arbitrary and meaningless -
Denver is an hour south with a metro population in the millions. But it didn't
make the arbitrary cutoff at 40N.

------
bmmayer1
Seems like Malé, Maldives is missing in favor of Hithadhoo, a city 1/14th the
size.

Edit: Actually Kochi, India is in Malé's box. So that makes sense. Interesting
mental gymnastics at play here!

------
enjoyyourlife
Nauru is not a city, it's a country. Its largest city is Denigomodu

Tristan da Cunha also isn't a city. Though there is only one city there:
Edinburgh of the Seven Seas

------
ghj
Why are some empty ocean squares colored dark blue and some light blue? Does
light blue mean there is some land mass there but it's uninhabited?

~~~
gbear605
Yes. That’s the concept I believe. I’m not sure how big a landmass had to be
to make the map though.

~~~
theandrewbailey
It would be good if empty pieces of land were shaded differently, too.

------
At1C
The largest city in Canada as I remember is Edmonton the Capital of Alberta
this is based on per Sq.M. just find that interesting trivia.

~~~
adiM
Interestingly the most populous cities in Canada--Toronto, Vancouver, and
Montreal, are not there.

------
ppod
I think Dingle is bigger than and west of Clifden.

~~~
mjd
Dingle is bigger, and is in the same box. The article mentions this, but
thanks for pointing it out.

The author of the map is preparing a corrected version.

------
Aperocky
How is Jacksonville larger than Atlanta?

~~~
strictnein
pop(Jacksonville) > pop(Atlanta)

903,889 > 498,044

------
29athrowaway
This is not a good use case for the Mercator projection.

Mercator sacrifices area accuracy to facilitate navigation.

------
techbio
A geographically curious conceptualization of the random error in sampling
artifacts.

------
cmroanirgo
Lol. Some of the Australian towns are rather small, showing how sparse our
population is:

Leonara: 2,476

Geraldton: 37,000

Mackay: 80,000

~~~
bbsimonbb
Google gives Leonora pop 556, which to me is much more believable. There's
nothing for 2k folk to do in Leonora.

------
baud147258
There's a typo in Port-aux-Français, the name on the map is missing an x.

------
codeOnMaster
Interesting that a small country like Cuba has two cities in a square.

------
m3kw9
So what’s the big deal of cities coincidentally aligning with one of his drawn
lines?

------
alexhutcheson
Pretty interesting, but it suffers from a common flaw for this type of
analysis - it counts the population that lives within the municipal boundaries
of the city itself, not the population that lives within the "urban area" or
commuting zone of that city. Different regions have different norms and laws
for how they define municipal boundaries, so in some places the main
municipality (e.g. Boston) is just a fraction of the urban core, while in
other places the municipal boundaries include huge amounts of suburban and
even rural land. Unless you're specifically interested in analyzing something
related to municipal government, this isn't normally what you want to use to
compare across regions.

Jacksonville, FL is an extreme example of this. Jacksonville's municipal
boundaries are _huge_ \- it covers 875 sq. miles[1]. This is ~1.85x the area
of New York City[2], and 3.77x the area of San Francisco[3].

Within the US, it's preferable to use core-based statistical areas (CBSAs)[4]
for this type of analysis. They're defined by commuting zones, and they're not
sensitive to political boundaries except to the extent that political
boundaries actually affect commuting patterns. If you want to limit yourself
to the "dense" part of the metro area then you can use the Census-defined
Urbanized Areas[5], but the definitions of those might not match your
intuitions about what should be included.

Assuming we use CBSA population, then the box that contains Jacksonville
should instead have Atlanta, which has an CBSA population of ~5.8 million vs.
only ~1.5 million in Jacksonville[5].

The statistical agencies for other countries have similar concepts. For
Europe, Eurostat defines metropolitan regions[6], which have a similar
definition. The OECD also maintains a data set of population by metropolitan
area for OECD countries, although the methodology isn't consistent across all
countries in that data set[7].

TL;DR - political and municipal boundaries aren't comparable across regions,
use commuting zones or density-based region definitions instead. If you see
Jacksonville, FL in a list of "biggest cities", it's always a red flag that
they're using municipal boundaries.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville,_Florida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville,_Florida)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_city)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core-
based_statistical_area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core-
based_statistical_area)

[5] [https://www.census.gov/programs-
surveys/geography/guidance/g...](https://www.census.gov/programs-
surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/2010-urban-rural.html)

[5]
[https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=United%20States&tid=A...](https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=United%20States&tid=ACSDT5Y2018.B01003&g=0100000US.310000&vintage=2018&hidePreview=true&tp=true&moe=false)

[6] [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/metropolitan-
regions/data/...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/metropolitan-
regions/data/database)

[7]
[https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=CITIES](https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=CITIES)

~~~
mjd
Yes, definitely. This sort of issue is very hard to resolve adequately.
There's no definition that always does everything we want.

A while back I wrote an article comparing each U.S. state's largest and
second-largest cities. ([https://blog.plover.com/misc/second-largest-
cities.html](https://blog.plover.com/misc/second-largest-cities.html)) I made
a perfectly reasonable choice of which definition to adopt, but it still had
major peculiarities: the largest city in New Jersey was Trenton, not Newark,
because in the data set I used, Newark was considered part of New York City.

------
angleofrepose
Unless I'm missing something, this map might be pretty or impressive that it
can be made, but it is entirely meaningless. Meaningless in that I don't know
of significant meaning of breaking down the globe into 10° chunks whatsoever.
This doesn't tell you anything about the cities shown, nor the area in which
those cities exist. There is zero meaning in this map because no meaning can
be derived from the filter process. The constraints have no relation to the
data.

The article is cool that it takes a dive into the "odder" boxes and finds a
flaw or two. The author also recognizes the arbitrary nature of the map. I
imagine that almost any other filtering would be more interesting to geek out
over though.

I am somewhat surprised by the popularity of this post here and on reddit, but
then again that is sometimes how popularity works. The piece is presented
well, just meaningless.

~~~
mjd
Not everything needs to have utility. Some things are just for fun. Utility is
important, but fun is important too.

~~~
angleofrepose
That's a fair point I respect. It does seem that it would be easy to have this
fun in a way which is also useful, with literally any filtering system which
had a relationship to the data. Equal work, equal fun, more than zero use.

------
margiani
Where is Saint Petersburg, Russia? It seems to be on the border of the boxes
and might be in the same box with Helsinki (metro 1,495,271) or Minsk (metro
2,645,500). Saint Petersburg's population is 5,351,935.

~~~
chrismorgan
In the text of the article:

> What the heck happened to St. Petersburg? (at 59.938N, 30.309E, it is _just
> barely_ inside the same box as Moscow. The map is quite distorted in this
> region.)

