Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
11.1 Maximum population density of countries and cities as
the function of area.
in some sprawling urban districts can be lower than
the farmland densities in the most intensively cultivated
agricultural areas. For example, in the year 2000, West
Los Angeles averaged only about 1300 people/km
2
compared to nearly 2000 peasants/km
2
of arable land
in Sichuan. But human packing can reach astonishing
levels (UNO 2006; Demographia 2005). Citywide
means are about 13,000 people/km
2
for Tokyo, 16,000
for Seoul, 20,000 for Paris, and 40,000 for Manila.
Kwun Tong, Hong Kong's most densely populated
district, has 50,000 people/km
2
, and Mongkok, the
heart of Hong Kong's Old Kowloon, had almost 90,000
before the area's urban renewal, about as dense as Man-
hattan's peak working population in 1969. In 2000
the borough's residential population was about 25,000
people/km
2
, and its daytime density of about 55,000
people/km
2
is as high as that of Tokyo's four central
wards. A plot of these rates indicates that every order of
magnitude decrease in the area is associated with roughly
tripled maximum population density (fig. 11.1). Smaller
spaces can be temporarily much more crowded. The
Wall Street area during working hours packs close to
250,000 people/km
2
, and this rate is surpassed in East
Asian public swimming pools or on Mediterranean
beaches, where the densities exceed 500,000 people/
km
2
. Maximum permanent residential densities on the
order of 50,000 people/km
2
translate to more than 2
kg/m
2
of anthropomass.
