Abstract
Measures of the effects of population pressure on the landscape using traditional methods for classifying urban territory are inadequate. The crude scale at which population densities are calculated and dependence on country-specific administration divisions hinder their ability to address such questions as the environmental impacts of cities and suburbs and make cross-national comparisons particularly difficult. This paper examines comparative urbanization measures among three case studies: the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province of China, the Indian state of Kerala, and the southern part of Florida in the United States. It proposes a measure based on the distribution of local population densities, taking advantage of the detailed data on small area populations and land area available in modern censuses and model-derived population databases such as LandScan, and the increasing potential of spatial analysis using geographic information systems (GIS). Examined with a similar set of thresholds, the resulting density distributions offer the potential to show better the ecological effects of population than do traditional measures.
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Notes
1,828,646 persons out of a total population of 1,998,257 are considered urban, while only 1,407.8 square kilometers out of 248,448 square kilometers total land area are urban (U.S. Census Bureau 2003)
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Rain, D.R., Long, J.F. & Ratcliffe, M.R. Measuring population pressure on the landscape: comparative GIS studies in China, India, and the United States. Popul Environ 28, 321–336 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-007-0055-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-007-0055-4