Geo-Journal #4 – Special Edition: Population Density
I’ll start with this. I love Google Earth. I mean, how great is it that you can look and see exactly what the layout is of the places you have been and the places you want to go. I have used Google Earth a lot since coming to Delhi, and it has proved itself invaluable. From scouting out new fun places to go explore, to planning routes for my walks in and around the city, or just trying to find the best route to one place or another so the Auto-walla doesn’t take us the long way (thereby jacking up the price on the meter). Then one day after spending months pouring over every nook and cranny of Delhi and New Delhi on Google Earth, I decided to look at Abbotsford. I don’t remember what made me do it, I just did and I was given quite a shock. Now we all know that Abbotsford is a much, much smaller city than Delhi. We also know, or at least can assume that the population density of New Delhi is somewhat higher than that of Abbotsford. But I could not believe what my eyes were seeing. Abbotsford looked totally empty. It almost felt to me like someone was playing a joke on me, and that the real Abbotsford had been hidden beneath a photoshop-ed landscape that somewhat resembled Abbotsford, but had had every second house removed. This got me to thinking about population density, and I realized two things.
Firstly, I realized that I am probably going to be mildly auto-agoraphobic upon my arrival to big, empty Abbotsford. By now I am quite used to literally squeezing through tight alleyways, dodging motorbikes and rickshaws, and bumping into peoples’ shoulders as I pass them. The second realization is that I will probably never be able to explain just how tight this city is packed to someone who has never been here. I can hear it already, “Packed? You mean like parts of Vancouver?” or, “Packed? You mean like Robson Street on Sunday?” No. I can’t explain it.
But then it hit me. The initiator of this entire train of thought could be the very resource that could make it maybe a little bit clearer for those who may never come here. So, I opened the Google-Earth browser, and flew on over to New Delhi. I took a snap, and I flew on over to Abbotsford, where I took another. Then I compared to two, and I was amazed. And now I will show them to you.
I’ll explain my methodology here for a minute. I first isolated a typical area of each cities residential areas. Both cities were captured at exactly 1000 m eye altitude using the print-screen function on the laptop, and the copied into Photoshop, where they were cropped to the exact same size. So, to the best of my knowledge, this is a fair comparison between the two cities. It should also be noted that while the Abbotsford image shows single family homes, the Delhi image shows two or three story tall housing complexes, thereby increasing the density even further. There is a good chance that there are more people living within the confines of this picture than there are in all of Abbotsford. I know this will still not do justice to what it is like to live in such a crowded place, but perhaps it makes me feel a bit better about my attempt to explain so.
The pictures are crazy...I am sure I will never comprehend the density of Delhi. It definitely looks like the Abbotsford picture was taken much closer...
ReplyDelete