#A POPULATION DENSITY MAP OF US SERIES#

On this map Charlestown doesn’t look much bigger than it was a couple hundred years ago, nor does South Boston.

What’s really interesting, though, is how closely some of this corresponds to landfill. It makes Boston and Cambridge feel farther apart.) Some of it is simply intense non-residential use, like the Financial District or industrial areas. Some of this is institutions-MIT takes up a lot of space in Cambridge, for example. The second thing is to note how much unpopulated area there is right in the middle of the city. Based on this map I would judge it to be an area roughly defined by the four T lines, with the exception of the Riverside and Braintree branches. I am adamant that the “central city” in any non-bureaucratic sense is not defined by weird municipal boundaries, and if density is a valid metric it provides some confirmation. First, looking at density is one way to judge what the core of the city of “Boston” is. There are a few things I take away from the density map. The densest blocks of all seem to be in the most central Boston neighborhoods, South Boston, some of Cambridge, the aforementioned Comm Ave corridor in Allston/Brighton, Chelsea, and most solidly East Boston. The patterns here aren’t surprising and seem to correspond quite well to the built-up areas you’d see in an aerial image. Here also is a standard but detailed map of population density in the Greater Boston area, classified so as to highlight variations in the highest-density areas. Might it shock those people worried about the “Manhattanization” of Boston that much of quaint old Beacon Hill is in one way already Manhattanized? Only a few blocks have Manhattan-level density, most of them of course in and around Boston they’re in the most central neighborhoods and in college areas (Harvard, Northeastern, and along Comm Ave in Allston/Brighton). (we are the third most populous country in the world, but we are pretty huge) nearer the high end is the average density of Somerville (the most densely populated city in New England and one of the densest in the country) and at the extreme is the average density of Manhattan.

At the low end is the average density of the U.S.

#A POPULATION DENSITY MAP OF US SERIES#

As usual, click these for larger versions.įirst, we thought it would be fun (okay, not fun in the usual sense, but in the nerd sense) to compare population density in Massachusetts to some averages in the above series of maps. They’re all based on Census blocks, which in urban areas more or less correspond to actual city blocks. There’s nothing novel about population density maps, but I can’t recall seeing many density maps based on new Census data, and it may be interesting to examine local patterns in some detail, so here are some maps based on the 2010 Census ( data here). It is of course very dense compared to most places in this country among cities over 100,000 in population Boston ranks seventh in population density (Cambridge is fifth), and among the fifty states Massachusetts is the third most densely populated.

One of the things that quickly struck me-and that, I think, becomes apparent to most newcomers and visitors-after moving to the Boston area is how small it is for a “big city” in the United States.

A population density map of us