Thursday, May 8, 2008

Population size: comments

This is a comments thread for the current poll. In your imagined ideal place to live, how many other people live there? I grew up in a village of 3000 people and went to college in a similar-sized place, spent a lot of time in New York City (7,000,000), went to grad school in a city of 50,000 far from any larger cities, and now live in a town of 50,000 very near a city of 500,000. I love knowing lots of people in a small community, but the cultural resources of a large city are very appealing. There are many other factors that affect how enjoyable a community is other than population size, of course, but everything else being equal, how many other people do you want in your local area?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I grew up in a town of 2500--with a summer population of 5000--and that was too small. On the other hand, NYC is too big. Boston felt about right but now that I have kids, I have trouble imagining raising them in a city of that size. I do miss though being able to take public transit everywhere and walking to stores.

I think, like you, I'd prefer to live somewhere smallish in close proximity to something biggish.

My ideal of course would be a planned live-work community of about 50,000 so that you had lots of individual neighborhoods (encouraging living in and using your local space) and could travel between them if you wanted something different. Of course, when I write it that way, what pops to mind is ghettos--Chinatown, the Jewish quarter, etc--but what I mean is something more SimCity-ish (but funkier).

Anonymous said...

Fran wrote:
My ideal of course would be a planned live-work community of about 50,000 so that you had lots of individual neighborhoods (encouraging living in and using your local space) and could travel between them if you wanted something different.

Actually, Reston was planned to be something like that. Of course, now many people live here and commute to DC, but originally it was envisioned as a planned community where people could work, live, play, etc., all in the same space.