OpenGeofiction
Hey you guys,
I just finished a small city, or at least I want to start working on something new. When I am done with a town or city I always find it hard to figure out how many people could actually live in it, which makes it difficult to start writing a wiki page about it. I usually don’t start with the idea “Oh today I’m going to build a city for 143,582 people”, I just start building and stop when I am either satisfied with how it looks, or untill I am bored with it. So I wondered if you could take a look at it. I figured that about 45,000 people could live in this city. Is that too many or too few? I envision a place with mostly low rise buildings, but also some appartment buildings of 5 to 7 stories high. It will probably become a regional centre, hence the slightly oversized industrial centre.
How do you guys decide how many people can live in your cities? Or do you build a city for a specific population?
Thanks in advance
Discussion
Comment from bhj867 on 13 July 2016 at 19:45
I could see closer to 20,000 living there. It is hard to tell based on density. I do think 45,000 is too many unless you plan on tacking on suburbs to the east. If it is a low density city, I would recommend closer to 15,000. I normally just guesstimate based on real world examples.
Comment from UnSoiDisantOracle on 13 July 2016 at 21:30
Once you have the built-up area, you can try to estimate the population density compared to other places you know from your country or elsewhere.
I eyeball (before going into JOSM) about 4 square miles, so 20,000 or more depending on how dense it is. 5,000 per square mile is on the high end for American small towns, but could be on the low end for European towns.
Comment from bhj867 on 13 July 2016 at 22:34
Oh Yes, I was not thinking of the American, European differences. I was thinking from an American perspective. A city of that size may have 10,000 people tops in the United States.
Comment from TRJ on 13 July 2016 at 23:09
Thanks for looking at my city and for the advice. As a dutchman I live in one of the most densly populated countries in europe, I’m used to endless blocks of rowhouses.
I took dono87’s advice and did a little bit of measuring. I compared my city to the municipality of Zutphen in the Netherlands (which roughly has the same population I was going for, slightly more than 47000). I measured the residential area in zutphen (roughly 9.7km2) and that of my town (roughly 7.8km2). 47000/9.7*7.8=37794.
I also looked at the average number of people per household which was 2.2 in zutphen, which I think is a bit on the low side (average number op people per household in america was 2.5 in 2015). If I took an average of 2.3 the polation of my city would grow from 37794 to 39512 and with an average of 2.4 to 41230.
So I think I’m going to add one residential block (up to 1km2) to my city and give it a population of about 42000.
Comment from Luciano on 13 July 2016 at 23:28
You’re on the right track. It’s all about density. For every place I make, I think about some real-world place I know fairly well that I imagine resembles the place I’ve made in terms of rough population density. Then I get the numbers from online for the real place, and apply that density number to the mapped place’s calculated land area. All my population figures are derived in this way. The only time I need to make changes is if my imagined density goes up or down for a given area (or if the area changes, obviously, due to boundary adjustments).
Comment from niels20020 on 14 July 2016 at 11:44
If you want to have an example for a town with 45,000 inhabitants, you could use the town where I live: Zwijndrecht. It has 44,546 inhabitants, according to Wikipedia.