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You get a bit sick to your stomach driving through Chicago's fringe.

But present-day Vancouver is also the product of amalgamation. It's a bit simplistic to say that whoever gobbled up the largest chunks of land that would be heavily populated in the future ended up winning, but that's what happens.

There's consequences: would San Francisco's urban culture be affected if it was just one neighbourhood in a city of 3 million people? Maybe not if it stretched all the way to Berkeley, I guess. Would Mayor Daley (whichever one) have the same power if he only reigned over the Loop and not the other 2 million people in Chicago? What if we had Mayor Miller and Mayor Ford simultaneously, along with Mayor Thompson in Scarborough, or whatever, all fighting for dibs on a Metro board?

If the main city is small, I'd think the regional government in place would become that much more important, as Metro was. Miami-Dade County seems to have an unusually large presence for an American county; Miami itself is not very big. I'm not sure how it works in Australia with Melbourne or Sydney, but they must have some kind of regional government power to counter the tiny direct influence of the cities proper.
 
What I mean is that the present-day City of Vancouver which stretches from UBC to Boundary road on the Burrard peninsula conforms to the same boundaries as it did in 1970, when it probably reached build-out. Since then, the population has increased 50% within the same space.

San Francisco is a special case for sure, being both a city and county that has kept its pre-war size. Luckily, most of the social problems that put a heavy burden on a city's tax base were exported to Oakland a long time ago, or just didn't exist in a city that always catered to the well-heeled and was never heavily industrialized in the first place. There would have been no motivation for San Francisco to merge with surrounding cities, especially since it didn't hemmhorage jobs or a tax base during the white flight years. Other cities that refused amalgamation, most notably St. Louis, were not so lucky.
 
Vancouver is interesting in that it's seeing intensification and redevelopment and still actually growing, which is not a given in central cities. The old city of Toronto is barely treading water even with thousands of condo units completed every year. It all depends on where the city boundaries are drawn. Actually, I'm not sure been what's going on population-wise in all of Vancouver's specific neighbourhoods over time, so the city's growth may be even more impressive considering the population overall had plateaued well into the 80s. If I was a betting man, I'd place my money on 1987 as the year the growth started spiking beyond echo boom effects :)

The 1906 Earthquake did help San Francisco rid itself of some of sorts of conditions that might have spawned the sort of ghettoes/slums that affected other American cities. Other problems were exported or just never developed, as you said, like a waterfront lined with mills and chemical plants, or a metro-wide reliance on a dying industry, or whatever. They kept their Chinatown, though, which was destroyed in 1906 and would have been lost (probably to Oakland), but various interests collided to rebuild it. A powerful regional government would probably have prevented Chinatown from returning to San Francisco, another one of those "What if?"s.
 
Like I said, there is little point in trying to have a rational discussion with someone who brushes off decades of rigorous scientific evidence as pseudoscience and throws in gratuitous accusations of fabrication and conspiracy, but who has neither the knowledge nor expertise to evaluate the science.
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On the contrary, I don't brush off the many peer-reviewed STUDIES done on ETS at all. And it is because I actually have a basic understanding of epidemiology, toxicology, the different kind of "studies" there are, and what "relative risks", "confidence intervals" and "confounders" actually mean...I don't have to just accept the barefaced lies and manipulated and cherry-picked junk science passed off as "evidence" that you and most other people obviously do.

What exactly is it that you consider "evidence"? "WHY" is ETS harmful...because someone or some organization tells you it is (or more likely, feed you information you know nothing about knowing you will draw an intended conclusion)?

The Surgeon General (Richard Carmona) made the statement... "there is no safe level of secondhand smoke".
Now...how do we know he is lying? Is it because he is a well known anti-smoking zealot? Well, it would certainly show bias, but no, that doesn't prove he's lying. We know he's lying because he is breaking the main principal of toxicology...the dose makes the poison. Mere exposure does not equal toxicity. ALL substances are toxic...in quantity. Just as they can be harmless in other quantities...or even beneficial in yet other quantities. But all rules of sound scientific practice can be ignored when it comes to the anti-smoking brigade. It's kinda like "pious lies"...as long as it furthers the "higher cause", it's acceptable.

I'm in favour of "persuading" people to stop smoking...heavy, long term smoking can certainly be linked to many health issues, including premature death. But I do not support the use of junk science to be socially engineered because they think the ends justify the means.

"If repeated often enough, a lie will become the new truth."

Paul Joseph Goebbles, Minister of Propaganda, Nazi Germany
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oooops...I think I just made the #1 cardinal mistake of "arguing on the internet"...I invoked "THE NAZIS". LOL
 
freshcutgrass said:
...because someone or some organization tells you it is (or more likely, feed you information you know nothing about knowing you will draw an intended conclusion)?
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Or perhaps because, as a practising scientist, I actually know what the scientific process is like and actually understand the experiments, studies and data presented in the papers? And am having a lot of fun seeing someone trying to rattle off a whole bunch of scientific terminology and concepts to sound credible?

Anyways, that's my last word in this discussion. Back to something slightly more relevant. We're number four!
 
And am having a lot of fun seeing someone trying to rattle off a whole bunch of scientific terminology and concepts to sound credible?
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Ah the beauty of anonymous online forum posting(ers)! you never know if a 12 yr old is schooling you with wikipedia facts or an actual expert is giving you an actual smackdown!

Anyway, did you say we're number 4??? Oh right, the EIU thingy that seems to gain more and more media exposure every year. I can't wait for the GAWC and Mercer to release their updated surveys too!

Sorry, back to the main topic. Yes, city proper Toronto and Chicago are about the same now. But Chicagoland is still larger in population compared to GTA, Golden Horseshoe, Southern Ontario, Tor-Buff-Chester, whatever. The Great Lakes are still graced with two super cities on its shores. Move on.
 
Ah the beauty of anonymous online forum posting(ers)! you never know if a 12 yr old is schooling you with wikipedia facts or an actual expert is giving you an actual smackdown!
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Yes, well claiming to be a "practising" scientist doesn't bring us any closer to this alleged "evidence" either. But then again, his credibility went out the window when he proved he can't even comprehend the data he cherry-picked off Google in his previous posts. Obviously he's addicted to junk science...a junk science junkie if you will.

But Chicagoland is still larger in population compared to GTA, Golden Horseshoe, Southern Ontario, Tor-Buff-Chester, whatever.
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But...what exactly is a "Chicagoland"?
Unless we know the exact criteria used to delineate this entity, and apply it directly to Toronto, we don't really know the answer to that with any certainty.

Quick...somebody get a 12 year old with internet access, and I'm sure we'll find out lickity split!
 
Not to revive a dead horse, but for people who have been following the US Census, St. Louis also lost 20,000 people to settle at 310,000 - the lowest population the city has had since the late 19th century. Yet, St. Louis is probably "doing" the best it has in decades, with new construction and residential conversion of abandoned warehouse properties in its downtown core, with the most central neighbourhoods gaining 20+% in population.

We will see this trend a lot - we already saw it in Toronto, where all the feverish condo construction only resulted in a 0.6% gain between 2001 and 2006 because thousands of people moved out of places like York - and I expect a similar phenomena to happen in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, when their numbers come out.
 
we already saw it in Toronto, where all the feverish condo construction only resulted in a 0.6% gain between 2001 and 2006 because thousands of people moved out of places like York
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I think this is due to the ongoing shrinking of household size...not any kind of "flight". I mean, we just aren't city full of Italian & Portuguese immigrants having 7 kids any more.
 
Hipster points out one of the dangers of looking at the raw numbers without considering them within their context. Our fixation with "more good" "less bad" blinds us to the real situation on the ground and how it impacts real people.

In the low-rise neighbourhoods of the old city of Toronto population numbers have been stagnant and in decline because of the rise in high-income earners and a shrinking in household family size. Basically, people are using their resources to increase their physical personal spaces. The implications of this are positive or negative depending on the vested interests in consideration.
 
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