What are the most “urbanist” cities in North America, the places you might
gravitate to if you enjoy dense, lively, mixed-use neighbourhoods and not being required to drive?
Subjective impressions are easy but building an objective ranking based on factors like density
and transportation patterns is harder. One option is to compare major core cities that
anchor different metropolitan areas: the City of New York versus the cities of Los Angeles,
Toronto, Chicago, Houston, and so on, using metrics like population density. That’s a start,
but these boundaries are arbitrary and hard to compare. The City of Toronto was amalgamated
with some of its suburbs in the 90s, cutting its density in half. Other cities like Los Angeles or
Houston have borders that are just plain weird, entirely for political and historical reasons.
A second option is to compare metropolitan areas, like Greater Los Angeles versus Greater Toronto.
This makes cities more comparable, but it has the downside of including an enormous
amount of suburban and even rural land that we’re probably not as interested in.
In this video we’re going to score the top 10 urbanist cities in the U.S. and Canada using a
different method that we think lines up better with how people actually experience their city,
which is at the neighbourhood level. Our urbanist city ranking is based on how much of each city
meets two key criteria: having a population density above 4,000 people per square kilometre,
and having more than 40% of commuters get to work by walking, cycling, and public transit.
This is the Seattle metropolitan area. If you cut it down to only the census tracts
that meet our two criteria, we get this 31 square kilometre or 12 square mile section of the city.
It might not look like a lot, but it’s enough to put Seattle at number ten on our list of
North America’s most urbanist cities. The most urbanist parts of Seattle are near downtown,
extending to the east and the north. A second cluster extends west from the University of
Washington, and finally there’s one lone census tract over in Bellevue with more than
4,000 people per square kilometre and more than 40% of people getting to work by walking,
cycling, or transit. We’re going to include transit on these maps but only
lines classified as a subway, not light rail or commuter rail, which leaves Seattle out.
Leaving Washington state, number nine on our list is the other Washington. With 64 square kilometres
or 25 square miles of the city meeting our two criteria, Washington DC has double the amount
of “urbanist” area as Seattle. Much of DC itself qualifies, and there are also clusters in Silver
Spring, downtown Bethesda, Arlington, Crystal City, and Alexandria. Washington shows us a
pattern we’re going to see in a few U.S. cities: impressively long metro or rapid transit networks
that cover way more ground than anything we currently have in Canada, but which don’t really
follow up with the combination of density and ridership around stations that you might expect,
maybe because part of the impressive coverage comes from following highways.
At number eight we have Vancouver, which just barely ekes out DC. Downtown and the
West End meet our criteria, obviously, plus neighbourhoods just outside of downtown like
Kitsilano. There’s also a chain of neighbourhoods following the very successful SkyTrain deep into
Vancouver’s suburbs, through Burnaby, New Westminster, and even to Surrey.
Transit is the most common non-car way to get to commute in most cities, especially bigger ones,
although by just looking at commuting we’re ignoring a lot of shorter trips that people make.
If the census had data on other kinds of trips too we’d probably see more walking and cycling.
The seventh ranked urbanist city on our list is Boston,
which has 75 square kilometres or 29 square miles of urbanist neighbourhoods based on our criteria,
covering much of the City of Boston but also Cambridge and Somerville. We visited
Boston a few years ago and really enjoyed it — it’s a shame it doesn’t get as much attention
on urbanist YouTube as other strong cities like Toronto or Philadelphia. Boston feels
like a sister city to Montreal in some ways, with 15% Halifax mixed in for good measure.
Number six on our list is Philadelphia, another big,
dense, historic city on the east coast of the U.S. Philadelphia’s more urbanist
neighbourhoods according to our criteria really consistently cover the central city,
radiating out from downtown to the south and especially the north and the west,
past the University of Pennsylvania to the very famous neighbourhood of West Philadelphia.
When interpreting all of these maps, keep in mind that our cut-offs were arbitrary. Why choose 40%
non-car commuting instead of 30% or 50%? It just seemed reasonable. Places just outside
the boxes usually aren’t massively different from places just inside, but we had to choose a number.
Our fifth most urbanist city is San Francisco, which is basically tied with Philadelphia.
Much of the City of San Francisco is covered, reaching past the Twin Peaks into Richmond and
Sunset along the streetcar lines. There’s also a big cluster across the bay covering Oakland
up to Berkeley and one single census tract in downtown Palo Alto. San Francisco is another
region like DC whose rapid transit system has really impressive coverage without doing
the best job of following up with density and ridership at stations. In choosing our cut-offs,
we decided to be more stringent on commuting than density, meaning that more neighbourhoods
across the US and Canada were excluded because of too much car commuting than too low density. Our
philosophy on density is that it should be legal to build for housing affordability reasons (yes,
this means you, San Francisco) but not all cities have the same level of housing demand,
and high densities aren’t strictly necessary for good urbanism.
Based on our ranking, the fourth most urbanist city in North America is Montreal.
This one is a big jump above San Francisco to 111 square kilometres or 43 square miles
of urbanist neighbourhoods, covering the entire central city around the mountain,
southwest to Verdun, east to Mercier, and north to the river border with Laval. A
few blocks downtown don’t meet the cutoff because there’s enough office space that the residential
density isn’t very high, which arguably is a limitation of using population density.
Montreal has better density and ridership around its metro than a lot of U.S. cities,
but the metro also isn’t as long, at least for now — the REM is coming soon!
In third place we have Chicago, which is basically tied with Montreal, although
the pattern of coverage is a little different. Montreal’s more urbanist neighbourhoods were more
tightly clustered in a big blob while Chicago’s extend further out but are less consistent,
especially to the west and south of downtown. It seems like Chicago has
more industrial areas in the central city breaking up neighbourhoods but it also has
less consistent density and ridership around rapid transit. It’s not the worst on this list
by any means but it’s still wild seeing so many vacant lots near rapid transit.
Obviously that’s a different problem from San Francisco’s self-imposed housing shortage.
The second most urbanist city on our list is Chicago’s sister city of Toronto,
which provides another big jump to 162 square kilometres (or 63 square miles) of neighbourhoods
meeting our density and commuting criteria. The big important lines on the subway — Line
1 and Line 2 — are pretty well covered as you’d expect, but what also stands out is the density
and lack of car commuting around the short Line 4 Sheppard subway. Reece Martin recently made
a video on the potential of this line, which you should check out if you haven’t seen it.
There’s also exactly one census tract outside of the City of Toronto, near Cooksville GO station in
Mississauga. The big roads and parking lots don’t look pretty or feel particularly urbanist but the
numbers don’t lie: building good transit in the suburbs and putting dense housing nearby really
can encourage transportation patterns that are very different from a typical car-centric suburb.
Before we get to the number one most urbanist city in North America,
let’s take a look at the runners up. Starting at number 20 we have Calgary, then Winnipeg,
Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Portland, Victoria, Quebec City, Baltimore,
Los Angeles, and finally Ottawa. Any surprises? Let us know in the comments.
The number one most urbanist city in North America? By a wide margin, you guessed it,
it’s New York. With almost 500 square kilometres or 200 square miles meeting our urbanism criteria,
New York beats out Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, and San Francisco combined.
New York’s more urbanist areas cover most of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens;
parts of Staten Island; much of New Jersey along the Hudson River, from Jersey City upwards;
and then inland to Newark too. With New York on top you might ask whether our formula
advantages larger cities and the answer is yes. Our ranking was designed to answer one question:
if you want to live or spend time in a denser, less car-dependent neighbourhood,
in what cities do you have the most options? We approached the question like that because
however you define them, urbanist neighbourhoods are relatively rare in North America. You don’t
necessarily need the sheer quantity of options provided by New York, but at the same time,
living in a city with just a few denser mixed-use areas can be frustrating and limiting.
The analysis we used for this city ranking was pretty simple, being based on just two things:
population density and how people get to work. There are dozens more factors that go into an
“urbanist” city that we would have liked to use if we had the data, from pedestrian
safety to noise and pollution and the density of grocery stores. But despite the simplicity,
we think the results actually worked out pretty well, especially the overall ranking
of cities which basically lines up with what we’d expect. The maps of more urbanist areas
within each city should definitely not be taken as exact, though. Our cut-offs were arbitrary,
commuting data ignores other types of trips, commuting data is noisy at the census
tract level, and we decided to use pre-COVID numbers so some patterns might be out-of-date.
Still, at least for the cities we’ve lived in or visited, this method did a pretty good job of
identifying what we’d call the main concentrations of urbanism. We’ve had this video in the pipeline
for a while but we were inspired to finish it after seeing CityNerd’s recent tier list of North
American cities. There really is no right answer for this kind of thing, but we wanted to present
a different way of looking at the question more by neighbourhood that we think is interesting.
If you haven’t seen his video, check it out and let us know how you think the results compare.
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