A reader yesterday linked to the recently-published United Nations World Cities Report. Sceptical as I am of most UN things, out of curiosity I dipped into a few chapters of the report.
On doing so, I stumbled on this chart
In a quite striking way it makes the same point made in an early post on this blog: as countries become richer, the cities in those countries tend to become less densely populated. Here was the chart from the earlier post showing data for London as far back as 1680 (just over a decade after the Great Fire).
These numbers shouldn’t really be a surprise. Space is a normal good – people typically want more of it, all else equal, when they can afford it – and technological advances make longer distance commutes feasible.
No doubt there will be some issues with how the data are compiled/estimated – quite…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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