Tuesday 31 January 2012

Population Density in New York City

In some recent posts I've been looking at the issue of population density. I did this for London in December and for the continental United States earlier this month. Given the extremely high population density in Manhattan, I thought it would make sense to take a closer look at New York City. So, I took some publicly available NYC GIS data, some 2010 US Census data and went to work. The result is the 3D map image below...


The mapping here is done at the Census Tract level, of which there are about 2,100. These areas have an average population of about 4,000 though there is some considerable variation between areas in that several tracts contain more than 10,000. The spatial patterns above are fairly obvious and, as expected, Manhattan dominates once again. However, the individual Census Tract with the highest population density is actually in Corona, Queens with a figure of 216,000 persons per square mile*.

There's a lot more information on New York City's 2010 Census results on these pages, from the New York City Department of City Planning...


* N.B. It's important to point out here that these areas are much less than a square mile, but I'm using square miles since it is a conventional measure of population density in urban areas).