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Wife and I tried to sketch a graph of population vs iconicity and realized too late that this needs a log x axis. The 0.5 -1.5m range is chock full of both iconic and non-iconic cities. But it’s astounding how much NY and LA pull away from the pack on a linear population scale
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You should be plotting based on metro area population, not the arbitrary formal city boundaries. What we call ”El Aye”, for example, isn’t just the city of Los Angeles, it’s also Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Glendale, Long Beach, Pasadena, WeHo, Redondo Beach, Pico Rivera, etc.
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what I am secretly trying to get at visualizing is a view of cities as space stations in some conceptual interstellar space, where the more dense+technological they are, the further away they are
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I shoulda threaded my thoughts on this... I have a bunch of scattered thoughts on my TL from last night.
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Graph I’d like to see: x-axis, log population of urban region, y-axis, measure of tech built-up-ness (per capita weighted index of electricity+water+concrete+steel+gasoline+diesel). Preferably with data points plotted as tiny little city skylines against dark starry backdrop.
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hmm I would look at "global cities metrics" (dumbed down from Soja's theorizing) because they try to incorporate this stuff, otherwise you may need to see who has summarized satellite land-use / land cover data (search phrase: NVLD) and/or combined it with industrial zoning.
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That would be of interest to quants, but metrics-based legibilization of techno-urbanism always hits a wall. For me, the metrics are just a means to a sort of narrative/qualitative end: getting a more poetic rather than wonky/quant sense of what "urbanization" means. A portrait.
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Really what urbanism needs is the kind of thing Wolfram called a computational essay. Somewhere between the narrative poetry of say Caro's book on Moses and the endless slicing and dicing with metrics. A right-brained way to grok the nature of the beast.
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