Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Field Note
“An overpass across one of Yangon's busy streets provides a
good perspective on the press of humanity in lowland South-
east Asia. Whether in urban areas or on small back roads in
the countryside, people are everywhere—young and old, fi t
and infi rm. When population densities are high in areas of
poverty and unsophisticated infrastructure, vulnerabilities to
natural hazards can be particularly great. This became stun-
ningly evident in 2008 when a tropical cyclone devastated
a signifi cant swath of the Irrawaddy Delta south of Yangon,
killing some 100,000 people and leaving millions homeless.”
Figure 2.3
Yangon, Mayanmar (Burma).
© Alexander B. Murphy.
No country has an evenly distributed population, and
arithmetic population fi gures do not refl ect the emptiness
of most of Alaska and the sparseness of population in much
of the West. In other cases, it is actually quite misleading.
Egypt, with a population of 78.1 million in 2010, has a
seemingly moderate arithmetic population density of 78
per square kilometer (201 per sq mi). Egypt's territory of
1,000,445 square kilometers (386,660 sq mi) however, is
mostly desert, and the vast majority of the population is
crowded into the valley and delta of the Nile River. An
estimated 98 percent of all Egyptians live on just 3 percent
of the country's land, so, the arithmetic population density
fi gure is meaningless in this case (Fig. 2.4 top, bottom).
Physiologic Population Density
A superior index of population density relates the total
population of a country or region to the area of arable
(farmable) land it contains. This is called the physio-
logic population density , defined as the number of
people per unit area of agriculturally productive land.
Take again the case of Egypt. Although millions of
people live in its great cities (Cairo and Alexandria)
and smaller urban centers, the irrigated farmland is
densely peopled as well. When we measure the entire
population of Egypt relative to the arable land in the
country, the resulting physiologic density figure for
Search WWH ::




Custom Search