Question for people who have visited Macau

Wikipedia lists St. Anthony Parish in the northern part of Macau as 98,776 people per square km (109,000 people in 1.1 square km). This is the most densely administrative district in all of China. But the other parishes in Macau (St. Lawrence Parish and Our Lady Fatima Parish) are not far behind.

What does it feel like walking around in this city? Does it feel more crowded then Manhattan. I've been to the Zocalo in Mexico city and it gets pretty overwhelming.

Quote: pacomartin

What does it feel like walking around in this city? Does it feel more crowded then Manhattan. I've been to the Zocalo in Mexico city and it gets pretty overwhelming.

I've been to Macau twice, and did not know that about the population density. Macau is not nearly as vertical as NYC, so you don't get that feeling of being as small, like an ant, as you do in NYC. They must really pack a lot of people in small apartments in Macau. Hong Kong seems more dense than Macau, due to the high buildings, and throngs of people on the streets.

Quote: Wizard

I've been to Macau twice, and did not know that about the population density. Macau is not nearly as vertical as NYC, so you don't get that feeling of being as small, like an ant, as you do in NYC. They must really pack a lot of people in small apartments in Macau. Hong Kong seems more dense than Macau, due to the high buildings, and throngs of people on the streets.

I read once that they were building lower middle class housing in Hong Kong and left 40 sq. feet on average per person living space. I remember talking to a colleague who grew up there and her describing how much space she and her six (extended family) had to live in. It sounded like a modest apartment in the USA. Standards of privacy were very different.

I was just wondering how it felt while walking the streets. If you are conscious of that kind of density, or are people inside their homes.

The most extreme story that I ever read concerned Hanoi. The local police started a campaign to arrest people having sex in the bushes in a large public park in the city. Naturally they expected to arrest a lot of prostitutes, but were surprised to find most couples were married. The sheer lack of privacy in their own homes forced many of them to have perfectly legitimate marital sex in a public park hidden in the bushes.

Quote: pacomartin

What does it feel like walking around in this city? Does it feel more crowded then Manhattan. I've been to the Zocalo in Mexico city and it gets pretty overwhelming.

You want crowded, try the Mex City subway. I swear there are sardine cans with more elbos room ;)

Seriously, some streets in Mexico City are very crowded, others not so much. Some are so bad there are traffic jams in the sidewalk. The worse are streets right outside a large government hospital or a popular subway station. These are lined with street vendors who take up most of what sidewalk is there to begin with.

Macau does not seem THAT crowded. Both times I was there it was summer, and unbearably hot and humid. This coming from someone living in Vegas. A few minutes in the mid-day south-China summer and you need a shower badly. So I suspect people stayed indoors as much as possible.

I suppose that shows how deceptive statistics can be.
Manhattan is obviously the most densely populated county in the USA, while the Upper East Side (UES) is the most densely populated portion of Manhattan. This zip code (10162) shows up as the most densely populated zip code in America. The zip code is 59,000 people per square km, more than twice the 27,394 people per square mile of Manhattan as a whole. But the zip code is assigned to a single tri-part building built in 1963 (one of the largest apartment buildings in the country). A three bedroom apartment starts at $8,250 per month and it faces the east River in the Upper East side. Sources disagree if it is 843 or 943 apartments.

Density is roughly 2 people per apartment. So this is hardly slum living. It is not hard to imagine more than 2 people living in some of these apartments without living under undue distress.

Some places in Mexico feels like you are surrounded by people, like the public places in Mexico City. But central park in NYC feels like that as well. I am told that Mumbai feels overwhelming given the density and the number of people who live on the streets. I have been to concerts where a million people were there, and it feels frightening when they start to stampede. It is easy to be crushed into things.

So when you read that a neighborhood has 98,000 people per square km living in it, over an area about 1/3 the size of central park you wonder what it feels like. I assume that they don't have such tall buildings. Las Vegas is 1,600 people per square km.

The media has stock footage to describe overpopulation, but it is always a picture of crowds.It would be interesting to tell off a Neo-Mathusian that you have been to one of the most densely populated districts in the world, and it doesn't feel out of control.


Malthusian snobs pray for cure for overpopulation
A misanthropic dinner party elite wants to see the human race decimated by disease – just so long as it doesn't affect them
By Brendan O'Neill
NOVEMBER 14, 2008
At the Beeb it is perfectly OK to wish death upon large swathes of mankind

The poisonous notion that the speedily breeding masses are pushing the planet to breaking point has become a casual dinner-party prejudice.

In the middle of all the hoo-hah over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand's childish phone calls on a late-night radio show, you may have missed a far more scandalous utterance that was made on BBC radio.

On 5 November, the upmarket Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3 aired a discussion about overpopulation between Dr Susan Blackmore (a neuroscientist) and Professor John Gray (of the London School of Economics).

Dr Blackmore said the "fundamental problem" facing the planet today is that "there are too many people". Professor Gray agreed. Then Dr Blackmore declared: "For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed."

So, it's official: at the Beeb it is unacceptable to make crude jokes about having sex with someone's granddaughter, but it is perfectly OK to wish death upon large swathes of mankind.

Make a rude call to Andrew Sachs' answerphone and you will be accused of dragging the BBC's good name through the dirt. Spout misanthropic nonsense about the need for a speedily contagious disease to come and wipe out mankind and nobody will bat an eyelid.

The disparity between the public reaction to Brandgate (wild) and the public reaction to what I think we should call 'Birdflugate' (non-existent) reveals a great deal about the warped morality of the cultural elite.

The reason why Dr Blackmore's remark received no coverage or complaints is because the herbal tea-drinking literati that listens to Radio 3 discussion programmes will secretly share her prejudices about overpopulation.

Malthusianism, the one-eyed belief that all of the Earth's problems are caused by over-breeding, is making a comeback in polite circles.

Following the discrediting of eugenics during the Second World War, Malthusians had been rather shamefaced about their beliefs. They continually invented new PC terms with which they might dress up their angst about "too many people".

In Africa in particular, measures to tackle overpopulation were promoted in the deceitful language of "choice" and "autonomy", by charities keen to avoid being accused of pursuing that far uglier-sounding goal: population control.

More recently, however, Malthusians have become more strident. The poisonous notion that the speedily breeding masses are pushing the planet to breaking point has become a casual dinner-party prejudice.

Earlier this year Prince Phillip gave a TV interview in which he offered a pat explanation for the food price crisis: "Too many people." On the other side of the political spectrum, a republican columnist for the Independent fretted about the "swelling billions" (that's people in the Third World ) who are pushing our planet to extinction.

Professor Gray has referred to humanity as a "plague". The novelist Lionel Shriver recognises that this is a "racially, religiously and ethnically sticky" issue but says "the threat of overpopulation is back and here to stay".

Dr Blackmore was taking these increasingly common prejudices to their logical conclusion when she wished that bird flu would come and kill some of us off (the "swelling billions", preferably, rather than Radio 3 aficionados).

She follows in the tradition of Earth First!, the eco-group which in the early 1990s said that "just as the Plague contributed to the demise of feudalism, Aids has the potential to end industrialism".

More recently, the Optimum Population Trust, which counts Prince Charles's eco-adviser Jonathon Porritt among its directors, said that if we don't find a way to reduce human numbers then "it will be one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse that bumps us off".

Enough. If Ross and Brand's outburst showed that comedians have trouble censoring their inner adolescents, then these middle-class fantasies about human annihilation suggest the cultural elite cannot keep its misanthropy in check.

The neo-Malthusians are as wrong as every population alarmist in history has ever been. Like Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and his followers, today's bird flu dreamers make the schoolboy error of treating population growth as the only variant, and everything else – food production, progress, human ingenuity – as fixed entities.

They are motivated by severe pessimism about humanity's ability to come up with solutions to its problems, and by the base idea that disease is the only thing that can sort us out.

Quote: Nareed

You want crowded, try the Mex City subway. I swear there are sardine cans with more elbos room ;)

Seriously, some streets in Mexico City are very crowded, others not so much. Some are so bad there are traffic jams in the sidewalk. The worse are streets right outside a large government hospital or a popular subway station. These are lined with street vendors who take up most of what sidewalk is there to begin with.

Nareed,
My friends used to go shopping in Tepito. They would always say you can buy anything in the world in Tepito. If you want an elephant, you go to Tepito.

But it seemed to be an unnecessary risk for a gringo. I probably wouldn't ride the subway. They say not to hail the Volkswagon taxis either, as it is very easy to trap you in the back, but I did ride them once or twice.

I am not so naive to believe that there is no crime in Mexico, but if you pick the highest crime places in the USA (like Detroit or St. Louis) you would have to be careful there as well. I am very well that Juarez is one of the most dangerous cities in North America.

What I see is a fear of going to Mexico by most Americans that extends to driving on a road, going to a restaurant, or even touring a church.

I have been to Mongkok district in Kowloon, Hong Kong. This is often cited as the most densely populated urban district on Earth. I stayed in a small hostel there and got a closet to myself in a shared suite. Walking outside I was convinced that there was some sort of festival going on, but it was just normal everyday foot traffic. People were spilling off the sidewalks. It was rather bizarre and didn't let up all day.
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The films of Wong Kar-Wai show the lifestyles/interpersonal interactions in these areas really well.

Quote: teddys

I have been to Mongkok district in Kowloon, Hong Kong. This is often cited as the most densely populated urban district on Earth. I stayed in a small hostel there and got a closet to myself in a shared suite. Walking outside I was convinced that there was some sort of festival going on, but it was just normal everyday foot traffic. People were spilling off the sidewalks. It was rather bizarre and didn't let up all day.
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The films of Wong Kar-Wai show the lifestyles/interpersonal interactions in these areas really well.

Mong Kok has been merged into the Yau Tsim Mong District in 1994 which is why it didn't show up on the list. Wikipedia says 130K people per square multiple with a multiple of 4 to account for people who are visiting and shopping. That is about 20 square feet per person including the buildings and roads. That is unbelievably crowded.

Quote: pacomartin

Nareed,
My friends used to go shopping in Tepito. They would always say you can buy anything in the world in Tepito. If you want an elephant, you go to Tepito.

Going to Tepito is slightly less risky than swimming among sharks with dead fish hanging all over your body. Slightly.

Quote:

I probably wouldn't ride the subway.

The subway is mostly safe, aside from pickpockets and sexual harassment scamers. The latter are a good reason for men to avoid the subway.

Quote:

They say not to hail the Volkswagon taxis either, as it is very easy to trap you in the back, but I did ride them once or twice.

The VW cabs are sometimes unlicensed and used for express kidnappings and robberies. I do stay away from them, but there are legitimate ones. In any case it's safer to take a cab from a formal stand than to just hail one off the street.

Quote:

What I see is a fear of going to Mexico by most Americans that extends to driving on a road, going to a restaurant, or even touring a church.

I was robbed right next to the bank, in broad daylight, not 200 yards from my office, near a large Walmart. My mistake was taking a deserted street in order to reach the bank's parking lot.

You can get caught in a crossfire on a highway between army or police and drug traffickers, it happens. People have been kidnapped a block from their homes.

Quote: Nareed

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You can get caught in a crossfire on a highway between army or police and drug traffickers, it happens. People have been kidnapped a block from their homes.

This happened to me. I was with my family in Creel, Chih. and there was a gun battle between the narcos and federales right on the main street of the town. Somebody got shot and went to the hospital. I had to walk back down the street from a club to the hotel while a gun battle was going on one or two streets over. That was kind of scary. My parents were actually on the street when the shots started ringing out and had to duck into a hotel. Even the innkeeper was terrified. The next morning you could see the bullet holes and spider cracks in the window of a souvenir shop.

Pacomartin - I just wanted to clarify your statement about the highest crime places in the USA. You mentioned Detroit and St. Louis. The statistics are very misleading on this, because St. Louis is an independent city and is not part of a larger county. The population of St. Louis is about 355,000, so the crime rate in the city is high because you're not dividing it over a large population.

I've lived here almost my whole life, and like any big city, there are definitely areas you don't want to go to. That's where 98% of the crimes occur. I work in downtown St. Louis and can tell you there are unspoken dividing lines marked by certain streets that separate the safe and unsafe areas. South St. Louis has some very nice neighborhoods and areas while much of north St. Louis is simply avoided by many people.

It you include the whole metropolitan area (a little more than 2.8 million people), the numbers drop way down the list. Every year our mayor's office has to issue responses to the people who produce these lists, asking them to change their methodology or at least provide better footnotes about the situation. It's a nightmare for the convention bureau to constantly try & sidestep these surveys.

I'm not trying to get on a soapbox or say that you're dogging my city - it's just that most people just aren't aware of the reason why StL shows up so high on the crime lists. They just assume it's a dangerous place to live, which is very wrong. It's a great place to raise a family, as long as you're not living in certain areas of the city itself.

Quote: Thread correction

The thread was originally about population density and how people react to it. There are a lot of media images that treat density as vibrant and exciting and the only way many people want to live. Certainly Vancouver, San Francisco, Downtown Seattle, Downtown Denver and the Las Vegas strip are very desirable partly because of their density.

As noted above, the densest populated place in the USA is the upper east side of Manhattan, and the densest zip code in America is the largest apartment building in the Upper East side. These areas are so expensive primarily because of their density.

Western world attitudes to population density in the developing world can be very mixed, but more often bad then good. As one pundit noted, no media person has ever used the word teeming to describe Manhattan even though it is often as crowded as the place they are discussing.

At the same time the Western world is often extremely wary of population stasis, often thinking of those areas as backwaters. Is anyone surprised that West Virginia is growing at a rate of 0.070% per year?

There is a disturbing tendency to treat the 3rd world as on an inevitable path to Malthusian catastrophe. We owe that term to Thomas Malthus who was one of the first people in the world to scientifically analyze population growth and overpopulation. His conclusion, based on what he knew in the early 19th century was the population growth must inevitably end in catastrophe.

The kidnapping in Mexico is a terrible crime.

The US State Department issues something called a "Border Crossing Card" to middle class Mexican citizens. I believe over 7 million are in circulation presently. It permits Mexican citizens to cross the border for a limited distance (nominally 25 miles), but effectively San Diego County, Imperial County, Tucson AZ, and the Texas border towns. The requirement is now that you must return to Mexico every 30 days (it used to be 3 days). Many well to do Mexicans living near the border have moved their families to the US side now for protection against kidnappers. They only need to cross the border briefly every 30 days. Southern San Diego county now has many of the former Tijuana businesses (clubs and restaurants) since so many people have moved across the border.

Quote: Toes14

Pacomartin - I just wanted to clarify your statement about the highest crime places in the USA. You mentioned Detroit and St. Louis.

Actually I do know that St. Louis and Detroit both suffer from city boundaries that were set in the 19th century and have not been updated. The City of Las Vegas is geographically 20 times the size it was when it was founded.

City comparisons are always unfair because the cities like San Diego, Oklahoma City, Houston, etc. are more like counties compared to early 19th century cities & counties. A city used to be something you could comfortably walk across in daylight hours, while you needed a horse to circle a county.

Unfortunately you never see crime rates reported by Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and it is very hard to even find that data.

Usually the other problem that you have if you talk about crime rates is that someone points out that many of the cities with the highest crime rates are black majority cities. That observation says very little about race, and a lot about racial relations. Most of these cities were once much more important and have gotten the brunt of white flight since WWII, and opportunities are only decreasing.

In 1870 St.Louis City was smaller than only New York City, Brooklyn and Philadelphia and larger than Chicago, New Orleans or San Francisco. It probably won't make the top 50 in this census.

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I was making a point about Mexico more than the USA. There is no question that the drug cartels are very active in Mexico and are extremely violent. Both borders can be very dangerous. Mexico city has very violent neighborhoods. Sinaloa and Chihuahua have terrible crime rates. Most of the crime (murders especially) are organized killings and not the drug fueled random violence of New York City in the 1970's and 1980's. They really make a strong effort to avoid shooting the gringos because it brings down way too much shit on them. There is always a possibility of cross fire. The state department releases a list of Americans that die in Mexico every year from any cause. There really is not that many who are murdered. You would think you are looking at the police report of a reasonably normal American city.

Unfortunately, it is Mexican citizens who take the vast brunt of the organized crime in Mexico. But really violent countries are in Central America, Venezuela, Columbia, Brazil, South Africa,Jamaica, and formerly Russia.

Quote: pacomartin

I was making a point about Mexico more than the USA. There is no question that the drug cartels are very active in Mexico and are extremely violent. Both borders can be very dangerous. Mexico city has very violent neighborhoods.

Once upon a time crime was confined mostly to the bad neighborhoods. Starting around 1995 things changed. Crime has been going up since then, particularly violent crime. Used to be, say 20 years ago, that you wouldn't park on the street at night close to a movie theater or restaurant becsue your car stereo might be stolen. These days you worry more about being kidnapped.

Random drug violence is also a serious concern. A few months ago two college students were killed in the crossfire right outside school in Monterrey.