A fascinating graphic produced by the LSE Cities research center, showing population density in nine major cities worldwide, has been shared far and wide online this week, and for good reason - it visualizes urban density in a far more telling way than mere numbers of people per square kilometer, showing us where and to what degree these people cluster in certain areas.
Despite the dramatic peaks, however, neither Hong Kong nor Shanghai are anywhere near the most densely populated cities on earth - and nor is density necessarily a bad thing.
Considered as a country, Hong Kong may rank in the top five for density, but as a city it's not even close to getting into the top 50. A large part of this is due to the Country Park system pioneered by the former British colony's longest-serving governor Murray Maclehose, whose Country Parks Ordinance of 1976 ensured that to this day protected countryside still accounts for about thee-quarters of the territory's landmass.
Even accounting for the space taken up by these parks, however, Hong Kong's urban density is a world away from somewhere like Mumbai's. While "density" and "crowding" may be synonymous in a lot of people's minds, conjuring images of poverty and a dearth of privacy, open space or indeed human dignity, vertical density is not only desirable but indispensable to the modern megacity.
Concentrating people, goods and services creates efficiency and conserves resources; it maximizes the efficiency of public transportation and minimizes the distance between places people go to on a daily basis. For most residents, supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurants and pharmacies can all be found directly on their doorstep - as well as MTR trains, buses, minibuses and taxis waiting to take them anywhere else in the city they need to go. In terms of transportation, Hong Kong has one of the lowest energy consumption per capita and, at over 90 percent, the highest public transportation traveling rate in the world.
This is particularly true of the New Towns developed in the New Territories from the 1970s to accommodate Hong Kong's booming population. Developments were erected on formerly agriculture land with the express aim of self-reliance, building high-rise towers around a town center with shopping malls, libraries, cinemas, government offices, clinics and bus terminals, all on top of a new MTR station providing easy access to the city center.
Tuen Mun New Town
With 22 percent of the world's population but less than ten percent of the planet's arable land, many have even argued that mainland cities, too, need to build up rather than out, and become more dense - not less - in order to avert endless urban sprawl that eats up precious land, imperiling the country's grain security, leading to further environmental loss and creating isolated, far-flung communities lacking both their own services and the means to access those in the city proper.
[Image via Vox]
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