Oct 05 2010
Explore Density Widget
Free Online Source of Data
Opening this data portal, like many others available adds a sense of capacity for a vast array of possible insights into urban demography – the social characteristics and vital statistics of the United States, and beyond. Given a foundation of veracity at the source, one or more people can gain the opportunity to become persuasive.
In the case presented here, it is the number of people in 2000 aggregated on a per square mile basis using zips as the boundary. U.S. Census Tracts and other boundaries are available, but zips hold the geography better at the community scale. I expect comparisons to 2010 will be soon, and fun to explore.
When vast amount of information like this becomes available, the first question is a simple one. What do I really want and need to know? Following a reasonable period of such explorations and acquisitions, our bonded rationality as humans is exposed. Once we are sure we know what we know, a better and simpler question is “so what?”
After a lifetime of work on the subject of urban density, I have come to a personal conclusion. Urban density offers a direct route to human success. The city extends the biblical metaphor of the ark to the earth itself.
So what?
One Response to “Explore Density Widget”
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This hybrid of the Fannie Mae site is welcome and equally easy to use at first glance.
Questions:
Why does the last cohort cut from 2,300 and shoot up to almost 160,000 people per square mile. Seems to me this is where it gets interesting. I would like to know of the zip location that yields the upper end “per square mile”. but left with tracking one zip at a time through NYC as the logical place to look.