--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> > In 2004, according to Statistics Canada, there
> were six Canadian cities
> with
> > metro populations of 1 million or more:
> >
> > Toronto 5.2 million
> >
> > Montréal 3.6
> >
> > Vancouver 2.1
> >
> > Ottawa-Gatineau 1.1
> >
> > Calgary 1.03
> >
> > Edmonton 1.0
> >
>
> Which is about 48% of the entire Canadian
> population. What is more, these
> cities, at least the four top ones, are true
> metropolitan centers with
> people actually living in them, rather than hollow
> business centers that
> become ghost towns after 5PM.
Again, from <http://www.demographia.com/db-usmet2000.htm>, metro US centers above 1M people add up to 161,517,899, quite a bit more than half the US. They seem a little generous on what they call a metro area, like Kenosha-Chicago-Gary, but still....
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Andy:
> > Our swaggering pious hicks are suburban.
> >
>
> I never doubted that. The point I am trying to make
> is the prevalence of
> metropolitan city culture in Western European
> countries (and I think in
> Canada) vs the prevalence of provincial small-town
> (aka Podunk) culture in
> the United States. Stated differently, in Europe,
> the urban metropolis is
> what people aspire to culturally and where they want
> to be (even if they
> cannot afford to actually live there) - while in the
> US it is what people
> try to escape from, and their cultural and living
> aspirations center on
> "small town America."
Do you have anything to back that up? I thought the populations of small towns, esp. in the middle 3rd of the country, and esp. among the young, have been imploding.
> In Europe, the status symbol is an apartment in the
> central district of a
> major metropolis (e.g. Paris or London), in the US -
> it is a MacMansion in
> the sticks, as far from the city as possible. These
> are not just
> geographical differences, but mental ones as well.
Living space in downtown Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco hasn't been cheap since the 70's, no? Is it that different in other cities?
Again, it's not that I disagree broadly with your conclusions, but you seem to be deriving your data from them.
Andy
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