Chapter 14 World Population and Its Distribution So far I ... · Here’s the world clock, as of 9:30 am on July 12, 2019. The ten most populous countries are shown below it. Eyeballing

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Chapter 14 World Population and Its Distribution So far I’ve devoted two files to physical geography and eleven files to economic geography. Now it’s time for another transition, this time to a group of files on cultural geography. I’ll begin with world population and its distribution. Here’s the clock maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau. The numbers are hopelessly unintuitive: I can visually distinguish between 100 objects and 200 objects, but I have no idea how to distinguish between 100 million objects and 200 million objects. There is one way in which I can appreciate these numbers, however. That’s by comparing them to the fine day in 1943 when my mother gave birth to her first child, a little boy named me. The United States then had 136 million people. No wonder the place feels crowded to me.

. https://www.census.gov/popclock/

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Here’s the world clock, as of 9:30 am on July 12, 2019. The ten most populous countries are shown below it. Eyeballing it, I’d say that China and India have more than the other eight combined. The other thing that disturbs me is that the U.S. is o. 3. We’re back to my feeling of crowdedness, even though there’s lots of empty space in the U.S.

https://www.census.gov/popclock/ A year has passed., and the clock keeps ticking: June 21, 2020.

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Here are the 29 countries that have more than 50 million people each. The top three have a combined total of about 3 billion. The top 10 combined have over 5 of the 7 billion people on the planet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

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Here are the least populous countries, all with fewer than 100,000 people. The unnumbered ones are dependencies, not countries. Tuvalu, however, is a sovereign nation of 10 square miles and about 10,000 people.

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Here it is, about halfway between Honolulu and Sydney. There’s a coral reef around a lagoon. That’s it.

Oops, I forgot: there’s a bit of land on the east side.

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Here’s Tuvalu’s man in New York. It would be amusing to learn the percent of Tuvalans who know him, then compare it with the percent of Americans who know the American ambassador to the UN. I think it’s a nice argument for little countries. Or little states: people in Wyoming are much more likely to know their senators than people in California know California’s. Or little cities: people in Norman are much more likely to know their mayor than people in Dallas. Personal contacts, I theorize, strengthen democracy. I

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Here's a map that emphasizes the tremendous demographic weight of China and India, followed at a considerable distance by Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. A swath of population stretches from Western Europe across the warmer, wetter part of European Russia and, to its south, across Turkey and western Iran. The map almost hides Egypt, where the crowded bit hugs the Nile, but it shows Nigeria well. The map shows how the rural population in North America lies overwhelmingly east of the 100th

meridian, plus in bits of the Far West and the wetter, southern part of Mexico. The map shows the crowded Andean spine of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, as well as the crowded coast of Brazil and northern Argentina—which is to say that it shows a nearly empty Amazonia and Patagonia.

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/map-population-density

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Here’s a map showing average population density by country. The deep purple includes Germany and Italy, India and Japan, and Nigeria. China doesn’t seem very crowded, but that’s because there’s a lot of almost empty space in the western half of the country. If we plotted the information on the basis not of national boundaries but of provinces, eastern China would be dark purple and the west would be yellow. .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_density_map.PNG

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Here’s a cartogram, with shapes deliberately distorted to reflect the size of the population. China and India are bloated; so is Nigeria. Russia, Canada, and Australia almost disappear.

http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/?p=2707

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And here’s a version in which the earth has been divided into cells measuring 3 miles by 3. Cells with over 8,000 people are yellow; everything else is black. The threshold, in other words, is about a thousand people per square mile or 1.5 people per acre. The map’s author says that half the world’s people live in the yellow areas, most visibly the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the North China Plain, Sichuan, and Java.

http://metrocosm.com/world-population-split-in-half-map/

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Here’s a list of the most populous countries about 35 years from now, when the U.N. estimates a global population of 9.7 billion (en route to a peak of 11 billion in 2100). There’s not a lot of place shifting, but Russia and Japan drop out of the top ten, and Ethiopia and the DRC replace them. That’s a scary thought if you think of the conditions in those countries even now.

http://www.un.org/esa/population/pubsarchive/india/20most.htm

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Population pyramids are a handy way of showing whether countries are on the path to larger or smaller populations. Here’s the pyramid for Ethiopia, with kids in superabundance.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pyramide_Ethiopie.PNG

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Ethiopia and Nigeria account for most of the growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is probably the fasting growing of all regions. Notice the sharp decline in the population of the EU (including the UK).

https://www.ft.com/content/1c7270d2-6ae4-11e7-b9c7-15af748b60d0

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Here’s 60 years of population growth in the Middle East (excluding Turkey). The young adult population, which grew in that period from 41 to 208 million, is emphasized in color because the difficulty those people have in finding jobs is largely responsible for the social unrest that erupted in 2010.

https://www.ft.com/content/03274532-21ce-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

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Here’s a country with the opposite problem. Parents are choosing to have fewer and fewer children, largely because children are becoming more and more expensive. There’s another reason, too: kids aren’t dying at the rate they did in the past, when parents had big families as insurance for their old age. They wanted at least one son to survive and care for them.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/12/japan-graphics South Korea is a particularly hard case, partly because the population is projected to decline from 50 million in 2013 to 40 million at the end of the century.

http://www.indexmundi.com/south_korea/age_structure.html

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More and more elderly.

https://www.ft.com/content/cf73149a-6542-11e7-9a66-93fb352ba1fe?sharetype=share I call it a particularly hard case also because the social safety net is grossly inadequate, with far more elderly poor than in most developed countries.

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Here’s how bad it gets.

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Singapore may not have such desperation, but its fertility rate is about the same as South Korea’s. (Statistically, women must have 2.1 children or more for a population to avoid shrinking.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/singapore-isnt-kidding-when-it-comes-to-fostering-fertility-11582376400?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=6

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Many European countries, too, are below that critical 2.1. The obvious solution is to welcome immigrants, but you know how that plays these days.

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The consequence is countries where there are fewer and fewer young people to support the elderly. The young might conclude that in fifty years they’d benefit from immigration today, but maybe they figure they’ll be rich in their old age.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/singapore-isnt-kidding-when-it-comes-to-fostering-fertility-11582376400?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=6

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China’s aging, too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/china-population-growth/

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The Chinese government introduced its famous or infamous one-child-per-family policy in 1975. Fast forward 40 years, and the Chinese government was so worried about a shrinking population that in 2015 it repealed the policy. Will doing this make much difference? Probably not, because Chinese parents, like those in South Korea and Japan, may want (or be able to afford) no more than one child. A bit of corroborating evidence: the Chinese birth rate was declining before 1975.

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The EU’s decline is likely to accelerate, barring lots of immigration. Why? The graphs below show the age when most women in Western Europe have their first child. The line shows that age in 1995; the bars show the age in 2015. There’s not much difference: in other words, in most of these countries, most women over the last 20 years have had their first child at about age 30.

Now consider Eastern and Southern Europe. In 1995, the commonest age for a first child was about 20. By 2015, that had shifted to 30, partly because birth control became available and partly because lots more women were attending university. The headline here is “30 is the New 20.” Starting late, these women are likely to have only one or two children, unlike their own mothers and grandmothers. With an average under two, populations will decline.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/10/daily-chart

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Home, sweet home. Want to guess how this pyramid has changed and is changing?

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/06/americas-age-profile-told-through-population-pyramids.html

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Here’s the answer: a growing population is slowly morphing to an older population.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/century-of-change.html

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So how is possible that over the next 40 years, the U.S. is projected to add about 100 million more people?

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/century-of-change.html

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Answer: about 40 million will have been born outside the U.S. Without those immigrants, the American workforce would already have begun declining.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/08/news/economy/immigration-workforce/index.html With immigration, it continues to rise, partly from immigrants but increasingly from their children.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/immigration-projected-to-drive-growth-in-u-s-working-age-population-through-at-least-2035/

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Despite the addition of immigrants, by 2035 the population over age 65 will outnumber the population under 18.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/historic-first.html

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The increasing ratio of the 65+ population to the 18-64 population is displayed below. The average in 2017 is about one in four, but there are huge variations. The elderly cluster in Florida as you might expect but also in the Great Plains, which many young people leave. Youthful populations are prominent in Seattle, Portland, Southern California, and most big cities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/retiring-baby-boomers-leave-the-u-s-with-fewer-workers-to-support-the-elderly-1529553660?mod=hp_lead_pos3

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We’re going to look at these distributions more closely, beginning with what we know best, the population density of the U.S., shown here by county. Notice the eastern border of the Texas Panhandle. That’s 100th meridian. It’s a handy reference point because most of the U.S. east of that line gets at least 20 inches of precipitation annually. (That’s water content, and an inch of water makes almost a foot of fluffy snow). Areas to the west get less than 20 inches, except in mountainous areas or along the west coast. In other words, pioneer farms had to be bigger west of the line because yields and income per acre declined. Bigger farms meant fewer people per acre. The pattern is still roughly true, with farms bigger and population density lower in Nebraska than in Illinois.

http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/maps/pdfs/thematic/us_popdensity_2010map.pdf

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Here’s an example to illustrate the point. We’re in the northwest corner of Iowa, between the 96th and 97th meridians. The Big Sioux curls southward; that’s Minnesota north of the line near the top. There are perhaps 20 houses in the image.

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We’ve moved 400 miles west to the southwest corner of Nebraska. We’re on about the 104th meridian. You can still see quarter sections and some cultivation, but there are no houses. The land is too dry to be very productive; it’s held in large ownerships, and the owners (or owner) live somewhere else. The nearest town is Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, about 10 miles to the north.

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Here’s a version that disregards county lines and shows how the country might look at night if lights were proportional to population and if the skies were cloudless. The most striking feature may be the massive agglomeration stretching from Boston to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. The region is often referred to as Megalopolis, “giant city.” The implication of that name is that functionally it is a single urban area, even though it’s divided politically into many jurisdictions. Empty areas on the map include much of northern Maine, upstate New York (that dark area is the Adirondacks), southern Florida (think Everglades), and the arid West, urbanized mostly where heroic engineering has imported water from distant sources.

http://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/dc10_thematic/2010_Nighttime_PopDist/2010_Nighttime_PopDist_Page_Map.pdf

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The most famous example of that heroic engineering is probably in Southern California, which gets water from the northern Sierra via the California Aqueduct, from the southern Sierra via the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and from the Colorado via the Colorado River Aqueduct. It’s not enough, so lots of other measures are employed, including conservation and desalination. The red lines are there to make you think twice before deciding to move out there! Yes, we now have quakes in Oklahoma, but odds are they’ll never do as much damage as the big one bound to happen one of these days on the West Coast.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-me-g-quake-water-map-20141212-htmlstory.html

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Here’s a map that makes Denver and Salt Lake and Phoenix and Vegas into lonely islands in a desert (or semi-desert) sea.

http://johnstonarchitects.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/understanding-global-population-density/

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It’s probably fair to say that the second most important characteristic of the population of the United States, after eastern dominance, is the country’s degree of urbanization. Less than 50 million Americans live in rural areas and small towns., and almost all the growth in the national population is occurring in bigger places. That trend is accelerating, too.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-divide-between-americas-prosperous-cities-and-struggling-small-townsin-20-charts-1514543401

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Here’s a version showing just the urban clusters. The least urbanized area in the Lower 48 consists of the states north of Denver, east of the Rockies, and west of Minneapolis.

http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/maps/pdfs/thematic/2010ua/UA2010_UAs_and_UCs_Map.pdf

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There’s another way of looking at this. The U.S. has about 320 million people spread out over about 3,000 counties, but half the population crowds into only 137 of them. In other words, five percent of the counties have an average of over a million people each. At the other end of the spectrum, 1,500 counties have a total of 17 million people, for an average of about 10,000 people each.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/urban-rural-vote-swing/?tid=ss_mail It hasn’t always been that way, of course. Over the last century, the percentage of Americans living in places with fewer than 2,500 people has fallen from almost 60 to about 20 percent. Paradoxically, the actual number of rural residents hasn’t declined much; it’s just that population growth has occurred almost entirely in cities and towns.

http://blogs.census.gov/2016/12/08/life-off-the-highway-a-snapshot-of-rural-america/

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Here are the states that still have largely rural populations: Vermont and Maine lead the list, with over 60 percent of their populations classed as rural. Other largely rural states include those of the Northern Great Plains and most of the South, including Oklahoma.

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Here are the 704 counties that the Census Bureau considers completely rural. They mostly lie in a belt right down the spine of the Great Plains. Yes, there are towns in counties still considered completely rural, so you might ask how they can be considered completely rural. It’s a matter of definition by the Census experts. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, for example, Boise City and Beaver are so small that their counties remain rural; Guymon has enough people that Texas County isn’t.

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It would be interesting to know what the residents of Boise City make of this. Why is their county still judged 100 percent rural? The answer is that the Bureau insists on a population density of 1,000 people per square mile. Boise City has just over 1.4 square miles but just under 1,100 residents.

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Here are the 1,185 counties (about a third of the total) that are mostly rural. They include the eastern halves of Oklahoma and Texas and, more broadly, all the states east of the Mississippi with the notable exception of peninsular Florida and the states from Massachusetts to Delaware.

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And here are the mostly urban counties, with some 80 percent of the country’s population. Most of the area of these counties is actually rural, which is how it’s possible for 80 percent of the total U.S. population to squeeze into three percent of the nation’s land area. Get comfy!

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The most dramatic growth over the last century has occurred in the Sunbelt, defined to include California, Texas, and Florida. The states that have grown least are those in the northern Plains, plus West Virginia and New England. It’s true that most people like warm weather, but there’s more to it than that. Some parts of the country welcome development; others don’t. In Texas, developers are good guys; in Northern California, they’re not.

• http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/maps/pdfs/thematic/changein_to_pop.pdf

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The southern tier is still mostly growing (except for New Mexico and the poor states on the Gulf Coast) while the northeast is losing people faster than it’s gaining them. Another big surprise is California, which recently seems to have reached a tipping point where more people leave than arrive. What’s driving them out? Candidates include house prices, pollution, crime, and the hassle of traffic.

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Despite these shifts, we’re less mobile than we used to be. The number of people moving from one state to another is down from about four percent annually in the late 1960s to half that now. The numbers moving within a state or within a county are higher but down, too. Reasons? Chiefly economic insecurity: not knowing how to move to a new place and get a satisfactory job. Housing prices make it worse, because the places with the best jobs tend to be the places with the highest housing costs. It doesn’t help that a quarter of all jobs require a state license, which can be hard to get. Barbers and cosmetologists, for example, are 22 percent less likely to move across a state line than people whose jobs don’t need a license. Result: people wind up stuck, or at least feeling stuck.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/struggling-americans-once-sought-greener-pasturesnow-theyre-stuck-1501686801

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No surprise: the areas with the least mobility are the most rural places, where the cost of housing is lowest. It’s no accident that residents in these places almost automatically vote against anything popular in the wealthier parts of the country.

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Adjusting for inflation, nobody’s gotten much richer over the last 40 years. That said, rural areas and small towns are poorer than urban areas—about 50 percent poorer than the suburbs of big cities.

If you look at household wealth, the disparity is even greater, with metropolitan families worth three times as much as rural ones. Thank the rising value of big-city real-estate..

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-divide-between-americas-prosperous-cities-and-struggling-small-townsin-20-charts-1514543401

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Spot Oklahoma in the lower third. The heavy black line shows net population growth in the state of about .25 percent between 2016 and 2017. The colors show the components of that growth: blue for the number of births minus deaths, light pink for foreign immigration, and darker pink for interstate migration. The darker pink is negative, meaning that there aren’t enough new arrivals from other states to replace Oklahomans moving out. It’s an old story. Compare it with Texas, where all three elements are positive and the percentage of growth is much greater. As a native of Idaho, I find its top ranking among all 50 states kind of amazing. Think refugees from Seattle and Portland.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/26/2017s-fastest-and-slowest-growing-states-are-neighbors-heres-why-their-paths-diverged/?utm_term=.be2920a862e2

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I try to avoid history in this class, because it’s so easy to get bogged down in it, but here are two historical maps of population. The first, from 1900, is striking because it hits that 100th meridian like a brick wall. The country looks settled to the east and almost empty to the west. You can pick out young cities like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Salt Lake, and Denver, but New Mexico shows Santa Fe instead of Albuquerque, and there’s no or almost no Las Vegas, El Paso, or Tucson.

https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/1900_population_distribution.pdf

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What a difference 40 years make. The old brick wall is still there, but not nearly as distinctly as in 1900. The pattern looks almost modern until you start looking at cities. Chicago’s nice and bold; so is St. Louis. But Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and lots more are way undersized. No wonder: the country in 1940 had 130 million people. Since then it’s more than doubled and, as you know, the increase is mostly in the cities.

https://www.census.gov/history/img/1940_Population_Distribution.jpg

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Here’s our northern neighbor, whose population hugs the U.S. border. The exception is Edmonton, which is not only the capital of Alberta but which leans toward the Athabaska tar sands. The broad patch of yellow ground corresponds to the cultivated part of the country, especially the prairies that are an extension of our wheat country. Canada's population total falls short of California’s by about three million.

http://www41.statcan.gc.ca/2008/4017_3119/grafx/htm/ceb4017_3119_000_1-eng.htm

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This map is interesting because it shows with a red line that the population of Canada is mostly within 60 miles of the U.S. border. The three metro areas (Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal) are all south of that line. The map, unfortunately, doesn't label those cities; instead, it labels provincial capitals. Silly.

http://www.census2006.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-550/vignettes/m1-eng.htm

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Here’s Mexico, its population clustered around Mexico City and its immediate suburbs. Two of those suburbs, Iztapalapa and Ecatepec, are hardly known outside Mexico, but each has almost two million people, more than Guadalajara, Juarez, Tijuana, or Monterrey.

http://www.populationlabs.com/Mexico_Population.asp

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Mexico City has a long history, of course: here’s the cathedral begun in 1573.

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The cathedral, not to mention the archaeological remains of the Aztec city on which it sits, are engulfed in a metro of over 21 million people (Mexico City proper has about 9 million). That edges out New York City in the contest to be the biggest metro in the Western Hemisphere (Mexico City is No. 5 worldwide, behind Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, and Dhaka).

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You can explore the neatly gridded streets of the Centro Historico on foot, but the farther reaches of the city will wear out your shoes.

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The most striking feature of population density in Central America is that the west coast is far more crowded than the east. Of all seven countries, El Salvador is the most crowded, with more than twice as many people per square mile as the next most crowded, Guatemala.

http://www.atozmapsdata.com/zoomify.asp?name=Regional/Modern/Z_R-CEAM-Pop

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Patterns like these change very slowly. The west-coast dominance was established by 1950. Since then, Western Guatemala has grown far more crowded, and El Salvador looks packed. Eastward sprawl had filled up the western half of Honduras.

http://gisweb.ciat.cgiar.org/population/map.htm

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Just to pick on one country: Guatemala from 1950 to 2000 rose (jumped!) from three to 11 million people. In 2020 it’s almost 20 million..

http://gisweb.ciat.cgiar.org/population/map.htm)

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Wonder why people don’t move into the northern third of the country? Short answer: it’s rainforest, where it’s hard to make a living.

http://www.fews.net/central-america-and-caribbean/guatemala/livelihood-zone-map/january-2017

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Most of eastern Nicaragua is wet forest, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Nicaragua Compare that with crowded El Salvador, where there’s a high percentage of cropland and an accordingly high population density.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_El_Salvador

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The most populous country of the Caribbean is Haiti, population 11 million. It shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, which has almost as many people as Haiti but twice the land area.

http://www.atozmapsdata.com/zoomify.asp?name=Regional/Modern/Z_R-CARI-Pop

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Haiti not only has the smaller half of the country but within the half is concentrated especially near the capital, Port-au-Prince. About 3,000,000 people in a metropolitan area of 60 square miles. That’s 50,000 people per square mile, or almost 80 people per acre.

http://reliefweb.int/map/haiti/haiti-population-density-commune-19-sep-2008

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You might argue that 50,000 people per square mile isn’t so much: Manhattan packs in 72,000. But Manhattan is covered with highrise or midrise buildings. Not Port-au-Prince.

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The population in South America follows the spine of the Andes from Venezuela through Colombia (watch the spelling: it’s not Columbia), Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. It drops off around the Atacama Desert, but picks up farther south, around Santiago. Argentina looks empty, except for the dot of Buenos Aires, and Brazil stands out, rightly, as far and away the most populous country on the continent. Even there, however, there is a lightly populated area corresponding approximately to the immense basin of the Amazon.

http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/grump-v1-population-density/maps?facets=region:south%20america

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Of course, the people of Argentina aren’t all jammed into Buenos Aires. They sprawl west across the Pampas, and there’s a string of cities running down the western edge of the country. From north to south, you can pick out (in black) Salta, San Miguel de Tucumán, Mendoza, and Neuquén. The biggest of them is Mendoza, with 885,000 people. Oklahoma City has fewer than 650,000. When maps make Argentina look mostly empty, however, they’re not entirely wrong, because 92 percent of Argentina’s 40 million people do live in cities, and about over 15 million of them, or a third of the national total, live in greater Buenos Aires. Compare that with the U.S., which is 82 percent urban and where the biggest metropolitan area, New York City, has 20 million people but only about six percent of the total.

http://www.fao.org/ag/agp/agpc/doc/counprof/argentina/popmap.htm

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As a whole, South America is, at 82 percent urban, as urbanized as the United States. That’s more urbanized than any other world region. The comparable numbers are 75 percent for the EU, 58 percent for East Asia, 38 percent for Sub-Saharan Africa, and 33 percent for South Asia.

https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf

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Like Argentina, Chile also comes in at 92 percent urban, with a third of its 18 million people living in one city. (I’ve never been to Chile, but if I went I’d make a point of starting not with Santiago but with a much smaller place, maybe Valdivia, down south and just a bit bigger than Norman.)

http://www.joeskitchen.com/chile/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/chile-city-population-density.png

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Back to the giant, No. 5 globally and with 200 million people. Brazil’s population hugs the coast the way Canadians hug the U.S. border. Maybe the Brazilians are a bit more adventurous. There are two dark dots inland about an inch from Rio. The one on the left is Goiânia, with a bit over a million people. The one on the right is Brasilia (not Brazilia), and it only exists because one Brazilian president (Juscelino Kubitschek) was determined in 1956 to push the country into its largely empty interior. The map suggests he barely moved the needle, even though metro Brasilia now has about three million people.

http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/grump-v1-population-density/maps?facets=region:south%20america

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Many of its buildings are iconic and perhaps even heroic in their symbolization of pioneer settlement; certainly Kubitscheck, originally a medical doctor, is remembered as a kind of hero. “Fifty years of progress in five” was his campaign slogan.

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Despite that leap into the interior, most Brazilians have stayed behind in a string of cities stretching from Belém (“Bethlehem” in Portuguese) to Recife (“Reef,” from the offshore reef), Salvador (the “Savior”), Rio de Janeiro (yes, “River of January,” from the date its first European visitors arrived), São Paulo (“St Paul,” of course), and Porto Alegre (“Cheerful Port”).

http://www.lahistoriaconmapas.com/atlas/country-map03/cities-of-brazil-map.htm

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Don’t underestimate these places. Here’s a peek at the beach-front boulevard in Recife. If I hadn’t taken the picture myself, I could be fooled into thinking this was Miami Beach.

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And here, between Rio and Brasilia, is Belo Horizonte (“Beautiful Horizon”), the capital of Minas Gerais and a city pushing three million people. Boring high rises like these accommodate a large proportion of Brazil’s population.

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Brazilians may mostly live in boring high rises, but they sure know how to have a good time. (Yes, this too is Belo Horizonte—and probably from the same day I took the previous picture. It was during Carnival, or Carnaval in Portuguese.)

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Here’s Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon. The town’s icon is this, the Teatro Amazonas, built around 1900 when the city was rich with money from the rubber industry. The city’s fortunes plummeted when rubber trees were established as plantations in British Malaya, but there’s been a lot of recovery in more recent decades. (I took this photo about 1984, which is why the cars are outdated.)

I went back recently and saw a new paint job. Improvement? I’m not sure.

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With the decline of the rubber industry, Manaus had either to adapt or die. The national government came to the rescue by designating the city as a duty-free zone, where parts could be imported tax free. Even when I visited in 1984, the city had factories building televisions from imported parts. Philips has lots of company now, including LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony.

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It hasn’t been a complete success story. Brazil is famous for its slums, and here was one in Manaus in 1984. The shacks were on stilts because the level of the Rio Negro rises seasonally.

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Another view of the slums at that time.

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As of 2017, some of the slums had been replaced by public housing.

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Some had not.

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Brazilians call these slums favelas. The name derives from a Brazilian tree common at the site of a battle fought by soldiers who were promised land but never got it. Instead, they squatted at a site in Rio near the word Maracana on this map. From tiny acorns grow mighty oaks or, in this case, from one informal settlement grew scores of favelas.

https://twitter.com/afp/status/452888009143115776

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Here’s the best-known favela, Rocinha, close to another Rio icon, Copacabana beach. Movies and the news media make these places into hellholes. Are they? Let’s take a look.

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There’s certainly a big difference between the formally approved city (the high rises here) and the squatter settlement that became Rocinha.

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The electrical system within Rocinha is haphazard in the extreme, yet it exists. So do water and sewerage systems.

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There are a few streets that motor vehicles can use but many too narrow for anything except pedestrians and two-wheelers. Motorcycle taxi-drivers wear yellow vests.

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The narrow paths are paved and lined with shops selling all the stuff people normally buy anywhere. Did I get killed taking these pictures? Apparently not. Was I robbed or beaten up or hassled in any way? Maybe I was incredibly lucky, but Rocinha seemed a lot like any community. Drugs? Not that I saw. On the other hand, I wouldn’t take this stroll at night, and I did have some trouble finding a taxi to take me here.

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The number of fatal shootings in the State of Rio de Janeiro has risen sharply in recent years. Most of the deaths are young Black men living in the favelas, and many of the deaths occur at the hands of police.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/killing-of-woman-who-gave-voice-to-rios-poor-jars-a-divided-brazil-1521975601?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1 Marielle Franco, a city councilwoman who protested police behavior, was shot to death, execution style in 2018. Arrests? You’re kidding, right?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/19/marielle-franco-brazilian-political-activist-black-gay-single-mother-fearless-fighter-murder

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We’ll jump across the Atlantic. Notice the crowding in an axis that starts in the UK around Manchester, then runs southeasterly through London and across the Channel to Belgium, Germany, and (on the other side of the Alps) Milan. Spain looks empty except for Madrid in the center and some coastal areas. The most populated patch in Scandinavia corresponds to the city of Stockholm, though you can pick out Oslo and Helsinki, too. (“NUTS” is a French acronym developed by and for the EU. It opens up to “nomenclature d’unités territoriales statistiques” or something like “names of statistical territorial units.”)

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Population_density,_by_NUTS_3_regions,_2008.PNG&filetimestamp=20111027073923

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The backward “S” on the right half of this map can be broken into three limbs. The northern limb is the Carpathian Mountains, the middle limb is the Transylvanian Alps, and the southern limb is the Balkan Mountains. (The term “Balkans” is also applied to the wider region of the peninsula between the Adriatic and Black seas and including much of not only Bulgaria but its neighbors.) All these mountains are relatively lonely places compared to the settled lowlands inside the curves of the “S.”

http://www.envsec.org/maps/dens.jpg

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Notice the rapid depopulation (shown in blue) occurring across much of Europe, perhaps most dramatically in Portugal and former East Germany. Bear in mind that the populations of both Portugal and Germany are growing, so this change is really a story of urbanization. The population of Greater Lisbon, for example, grew 77 percent between 1960 and 2001; the population of Portugal in the same period grew 17 percent. It’s a story replayed in country after country: people move to the city in hopes of a better life. Whether they find it or not, only a minority return to rural life, often when they’ve made enough money to live there comfortably.

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/images/d/d6/Population_change%2C_by_NUTS_3_regions%2C_2008.PNG

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Here’s a bit of Britain’s Suffolk County, intensively farmed but also heavily settled, with houses scattered along the meandering road network. True, most of the people living in the Suffolk countryside today don’t farm, but earlier generations did. By the way, this is the countryside famously painted two centuries ago by John Constable; the initials at the lower right refer to “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” even though it’s been transformed by human action and so is not “natural,” at least in the sense of being wild.

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Here, for contrast is Hammerfest, a fishing village, and Melkoya Island, which has seen major investment in an LNG export terminal. Tthe countryside has always been too cold and barren to support many people.

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Russia is astonishingly empty, with the major exceptions of the farmlands north of the Caucasus, the big cities of European Russia (especially Moscow and Petersburg) and, to a much lesser extent, the towns along the line of the Trans-Siberian railway. Siberia north of the railway looks empty with the exceptions of Norilsk (175,000 people) and Yakutsk (290,000).

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-russia-permanent-struggle

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Add the four darkest-tinted regions together, and you get about 95 million people, just about two-thirds of the national total.

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21708876-political-reform-essential-prerequisite-flourishing-economy-milk-without

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Here, with the same regions, is Russia’s population density per square kilometer. For comparison, Oklahoma has about 20 people per square kilometer; Texas has about 40; Alaska has about 2.4.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-russias-vast-frontier-lots-of-free-land-and-few-takers-11571909402?mod=hp_lead_pos9

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No mystery: the country dries out east of the Volga River and the Caspian Sea.

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Accordingly, the population thins out east of the Caspian, with the striking exception of the farming areas flanking the rivers that flow into the Aral Sea.

http://maps.unomaha.edu/peterson/funda/MapLinks/Russia.htm

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Think that the population density change is visible from the air? The northern half or third of European Russia is still mostly in forest, while the land to the south is mostly cultivated, except in the drier east.

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Suppose we draw a line south from Moscow about 400 miles into Ukraine.

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At the north end of the line, where agriculture has historically been a story of rye and potatoes, forest covers more than half the land.

Down at the south end of the line (you can see the Russia-Ukraine border) the land is almost all cultivated, which in the days before farm mechanization meant more people to work the fields.

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When the USSR split up, it did so largely on ethnic lines, which you can pick out here not only in Ukraine and (to its north) Belarus, but also in the “stans” of Central Asia. (Note: Belarus means White Rus, but nobody knows what “Rus” means. Lots of people jump to the conclusion that it refers to Russia. It doesn’t.)

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/seminar.497.2010.russia/internal_conflicts

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The “stans” are largely empty, except where the two great river valleys provide irrigation water.

http://envsec.grid.unep.ch/centasia/maps/cadens.jpg

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Maps are fine, but let’s go to Bukhara, just below the “k” of Uzbekistan in the map above. I want to go north of town about 20 miles to Vobkent, where the red pin is.

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This is cotton country, developed by the Soviet government and now under Uzbek government management.

A century ago this was desert, but Soviet-engineered canals brought irrigation water from the Amu Darya.

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The Soviets wanted to mechanize agriculture, and they succeeded in doing that. Here’s a local tractor heading into town.

The Soviets were famously atheistic, but the people here were and are Muslim, unless they’re descended from Russian migrants. Evidence? This fantastic minaret, built outside a mosque in 1198.

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I don’t think you can climb this one. If I could have, I would have—and I’d have pictures to prove it.

Most neighborhood mosques and minarets are much simpler.

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Once there were a few rich landlords around here. Here’s one of their houses, converted into a government office after the Soviets found a convenient bullet for the owner.

Most houses are a lot simpler. Here’s the entrance to one.

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Inside, it’s laid out as rooms around a garden courtyard. Pretty simple, eh?

The kitchen’s even more basic.

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Funny thing, the people didn’t seem any happier or less happy than Americans. I admit the conversation was pretty basic.

Want to go shopping? Hope you like melons.

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Hardware store.

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Of course we could go to the big city, Bukhara. There we’d find garlic and potatoes and whisk brooms and T-shirts.

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Makes me want to get out of Norman and go someplace. Sigh: back to the maps. Here’s a close-up of the crowded corner of Central Asia. Stalin imposed the extremely confusing boundaries. Uzbekistan reaches east to Andijan, Tajikistan has a peninsula butting into Uzbekistan, and western Kyrgyzstan is shaped like an open jaw.

http://envsec.grid.unep.ch/centasia/maps/11-populationdensity.jpg

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When I look at the map, Tajikistan looks like a terrier yapping while sticking its head inside the open mouth of a bear.

http://www.waa.ox.ac.uk/XDB/tours/silk2.asp

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Here’s an overview of Asia. Notice the emptiness of the Arabian Peninsula, though in the middle of it the Saudi capital, Riyadh, shows up. The most crowded part of the peninsula belongs to Yemen, because it has the most rain. Turkey looks comparatively crowded for the same reason: it’s not a desert. You can pick out the Fertile Crescent, too, running along the east coast of the Mediterranean—Israel, Lebanon, Syria—then curving around southeastern Turkey and bending south to include Mesopotamia and the Zagros. (That name, “Fertile Crescent,” is one of the best-known geographical terms. It’s a bit of a puzzle. The phrase was popularized in some high-school textbooks written a century ago by an American archaeologist named James Breasted, and for some reason it took deep root in the minds of American kids. Go figure. It’s not part of the vocabulary of people in the region itself.)

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The two demographic heavyweights in this neighborhood are Turkey and Iran, but much of Iran is empty. (The large empty area just southeast of Tehran is the Dasht-i-Kavir and a southern extension called the Dasht-i-Lut.) The most densely settled part, away from the capital region and the major cities of Tabriz, Esfahan, and Shiraz—all in the Zagros—is the Caspian coast, most of which belongs to the province called Mazandaran. This is fertile country, warm and wet enough to grow rice.

http://chyzmyz.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/map-iran-population-density-2004.jpg

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You can see how much of Iran is economically almost worthless (the area shown in pink and tan). Farmland (brown) is scarce.

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/atlas_middle_east/iran_land.jpg

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Much of the most productive land is in Mazandaran.

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Turkey has no comparable empty areas, though you can see that coastal areas tend to be more crowded than the interior. The exception is the province around the capital city, Ankara. There’s a lot more variation on the ground than you can see on this map, however. See the big northeastern province called Erzurum?

https://www.eea.europa.eu/soer/countries/tr/country-introduction-turkey/2.jpg/view

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I’ve drawn a line across it, about 115 miles long.

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At the north end of the line, rugged hills.

East of the town of Erzurum, we’re in an irrigated valley.

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The irrigated valley was developed in the 20th century, which is why settlement is concentrated in towns. People working in mechanized agriculture don’t need to live close to the fields.

At the south end of the line, we’re backs to hills, though gentler.

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We may as well follow the crowd west into North Africa, a region known in Arabic as the Maghreb (in Arabic literally “The West”). Why “West?” Because it’s west from the perspective of the early Muslims who swept that way out of Arabia in the eighth-century. The population here hugs the coast with the great exception of the Nile, which forks at Khartoum, capital of Sudan. The blank spot at the north end of Sudan used to be inhabited, but everyone had to leave with the creation of Lake Nasser, formed by the High Aswan Dam. Scattered across the desert you see oases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_Density.PNG

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Don't trust the map above for fine detail, but if you search Siwa you can see an important Egyptian oasis, far west of the Nile and close to Libya.

We’re below sea level here, and the water you see is salty.

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Those be date palms.

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You don’t expect to see lakes in the Sahara, but there are some, fed by springs. The springs are fresh, but the lake with steady evaporation has grown intensely salty.

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South of the Sahara, the most crowded countries are Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the region around Lake Victoria, including not only Uganda and Kenya but Rwanda, Burundi, and northwestern Tanzania. We’ll look for a minute at one particular spot, that triangle of dark orange in Sudan.

http://www.catsg.org/cheetah/07_map-centre/7_1_entire-range/thematic-maps/human_density_africa_2000.png

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This is the Gezira Scheme, built by the British in the 1920s to grow cotton in the desert. Nomads were settled in villages here to work the cotton fields. Zoom out a bit and you can see the barren desert all round, though some of it is occasionally planted to unirrigated sorghum. (There’s a dam at Sennar; that’s where the water is diverted from the Blue Nile and spread over the Gezira. The word “gezira” in Arabic means “island” or “peninsula” and refers in this case to the wedge between the branches of the Nile. The same word is familiar from the Qatari broadcaster called Al Jazeera. Qatar, after all, is a peninsula.)

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Close-up of the Gezira fields.

It's lonely work, opening furrows to allow the irrigation water to enter.

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The Gezira villages aren’t so lonely, but they’re pretty impoverished. Here’s a picture I took of a classroom in about 1986. Are things better now? I’m doubtful.

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The girl in the foreground said she wanted to be a doctor. I hope she made it.

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Most occupations are much simpler, like this tea-seller in the market.

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Or this fast-food vendor.

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Here’s Ethiopia’s hundred million people, concentrated in the central plateau and almost ignoring the eastern Ogaden Region, a desert occupied almost entirely by Somalis.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ethiopia_population_density_map.jpg

https://www.ogaden.com/ogaden-occupied-front/

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Here’s annual precipitation: it looks the same as the population map. See the Great Rift Valley cutting through the country just east of Addis Ababa?

http://www.bestcountryreports.com/Precipitation_Map_Ethiopia.php

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Here it is again, marked by a lake. You can see the ridge at the western edge of the image and the slope down into the valley.

Many roads descend into the valley. Each of the roads is lined with houses, and each house has a field or two.

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Draw a line from Lake Tana (source of the Blue Nile) south to the Kenya border. It’s about 600 miles long.

At mile 50, almost all the land is cultivated.

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Ditto, mile 250.

Mile 450 is rougher but still largely cultivated.

Down by the Kenya border, we’re in the desert.

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Kenya, too, has a lot of desert. Nairobi pops up, of course, along with Mombasa on the coast and the uplands north and west of Nairobi.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Population-density-in-Kenya_fig1_257788768

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The rule is pretty simple: where you can grow a crop, you do. Here we stand on the edge of the Great Rift Valley maybe 30 miles west of Nairobi. Houses are scattered along the roads.

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The population of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is concentrated in the north (especially Kano State) and the south (especially around Lagos and the Niger Delta. Why? During the 19th century, Muslim armies invaded the central region from the north, making it unsafe. People either moved north, if they were (or were willing to become) Muslims, or they moved south, particularly to the southwest. The central part of the country has never fully recovered, though in the 1980s a new national capital was created there at Abuja (shown here as FCT-ABJ, for Federal Capital Territory-Abuja). The high density in the southeast is a different story. This region was spared wars and slave raiders, and so its population grew relatively unchecked. This was yam country, supplemented by oil palms, but soil depletion seriously reduced agricultural productivity, which is why millions of southeasterners have moved elsewhere, either domestically or abroad, and begun sending money back home to their families. This migration is a sensitive subject, because many of the southeasterners are Igbo (also spelled Ibo), and their financial acumen has made them the object of resentment elsewhere in Nigeria, much like the Jews in Europe, the Armenians in the Middle East, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Population-density-of-the-different-States-in-Nigeria-Source-of-data-National_fig2_277959845

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Here’s a mosque in Oshogbo, in central Nigeria. It tells you something about the social history of the country that I was warned not to take this photo but took it anyway when I had a second or two when I figured I wouldn’t be noticed.

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The native religion here before the arrival of Islam was a kind of nature worship, including the worship of water as the mother of livings there. Here’s a representation of her along the banks of a river. The goddess is called Osun, and so is the river. Maintaining these images is, like taking a picture of the local mosque, a tricky business.

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Population growth over the last few decades has pushed cropland (yellow) into former areas of forest and savannas. The maps are from 1975 and 2013.

https://eros.usgs.gov/westafrica/land-cover/land-use-land-cover-and-trends-nigeria

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Here's a close-up of South Africa. You can see the Orange River snaking across the almost empty and very dry Northern Cape Province. The gray enclaves are the independent countries of Lesotho and Swaziland. The crowded areas? Up in the northeast, the tiny province of Gauteng (pronounced “How-teng”) stands out: it’s metro Johannesburg. Down on the east coast, there’s the big city of Durban, which is the population center of Kwazulu-Natal. At the southern tip of the country there’s Cape Town. See the little hook on the map near Cape Town. It’s the Cape of Good Hope. It looks pointy on the map.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:South_Africa_2011_population_density_map.svg

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On the ground, too.

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We got sidetracked from the Middle East to Africa, but now I’ll come back to Asia. Notice the patchy dense area at the foot of the Himalaya. This is the Indo-Gangetic Plain, stretching from Lahore on the west through Delhi to Kolkata (Calcutta). The snaky orange strip in Pakistan is the valley of the Indus. Notice how the settled area fans out upstream. This is the province called the Punjab. The name means “five waters” and refers to the rivers that flow across the province and finally join the Indus. At the partition of British India in 1947, the Punjab was split, which is why there is both an Indian Punjab and a Pakistani one. Burma is largely empty except for the delta and valley of the Irrawaddy. Sri Lanka’s population is concentrated around the western port city, Colombo. The empty patch east of Pakistan’s great river is the Thar or Great Indian Desert. The smaller empty patch in peninsular India is the region where Kipling’s Jungle Book is set; it’s now the remote and forested state called Chhattisgarh (“Thirty-Six Forts”). I once tried to get some government officials to give me a little tour, but they declined, fearful of attack by Maoist insurgents who naturally find the place a safe refuge.

http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/pubs/gdp/pop/gif/indiac.gif

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Here’s a famous bit of the Ganges Valley. Well, famous is a bit of an exaggeration, but about 1950 India began a major program of rural development. It started out here in Mahewa, which is east of Agra about 90 miles. The farmers here live in villages, unlike the pattern we’re used to in the United States, where farmers live on their farms. Why? More security from bandits, plus their holdings are usually scattered, not compact.

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An improved village path in Maheva.

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Fishing farther downstream in a branch of the Ganges near Bishnupur.

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Carrying firewood home for cooking, also near Bishnupur.

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Women have been gathering at wells since time immemorial. In this case, the traditional well has been replaced by a public tap. We’re west of Delhi, near Hissar.

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People gathering for religious festivals in India make the United States seem colorless.

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You’ve seen the marks or tilaks that men and women often apply to their foreheads. Here’s the powder they use. It’s most commonly called kumkum.

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We’ll head toward Southeast Asia, stopping first in Bangladesh, population 167 million. That’s 2,900 per square mile (versus 55 in Oklahoma and about 110 in Texas).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Bangladesch_Bev%C3%B6lkerungsdichte_2011.svg

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Here’s a relatively lonely part of Bangladesh. We’re in Kushtia District, close to the Ganges, and here’s a farmstead surrounded by its fields. Unusual! The people aren’t in a village.

Here’s the house. That’s a plow.

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And here are the people. Women secluded.

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A girl was cooking outside.

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She turned around. Click! Note: the young men in the center of the family photo asked me if I could help them get green cards. I’m not sure they believed me when I said I couldn’t.

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Some family members might move to Dhaka and look for work. Hard to get—and people here work hard if they want to eat.

We’re at Narayanganj, close to the Padma River, one of the mouths of the Ganges.

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Breaking a leg would be a disastrously life-changing event.

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Java, too, is famously crowded. It almost makes the Philippines look empty, even though 100 million people live there. On the Asian mainland east of Burma, three deltas stand out. One is the delta of the Chao Phraya in Thailand: Bangkok’s here. The other two are in Vietnam and are the deltas of the Red in the north and Mekong in the south. Each has a metropolis: Hanoi in the north and Ho Chi Minh City, usually called just HCMC, in the south. (HCMC was known to a previous generation of Americans by its Chinese name, Saigon.) Most of the Southeast Asian mainland is sparsely settled, as is most of Borneo, Sumatra, and New Guinea.

http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/pubs/gdp/pop/gif/seasiac.gif

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Even within super-crowded Java, population is unevenly dispersed. You can see major urban areas, especially Jakarta with its 10 million people, but the island has 140 million people, and they stay away from the most mountainous (usually volcanic) regions.

http://www.sinfonica.or.jp/international/indonesia_hp/indonesia_pop_density_Jawa-bali.jpg Here’s the view from a hilltop near Yogyakarta: rice paddies, forest, villages.

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Think I’m alone on the hilltop? Think again.

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Here’s a bit of a puzzle. We’re in rural Bali, next door to Java. What’s going on?

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This is rice country.

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The men, however, had taken an afternoon off for one of the local pastimes: cockfighting. It didn’t last long—it took a lot longer for the bookmakers to collect the bets the men were making.

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We’ve come up to Banaue, in the mountains of northern Luzon. Looks empty, except for that road cut in the background.

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Here we are on the road at a spot where a path takes off.

A jeepney comes by.

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It’s heading to the town of Banaue, as famous as Bali for its terraces.

It’s super-photogenic, but don’t be misled: the people here depend on remittances sent back from family members working somewhere else. I remember a villager here scoffing and telling me that rice cultivation here was “sentimental agriculture.”

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This map of Chinese population density omits the western half of the country for the simple reason that those areas (Xinjiang and Tibet) are very empty. It focuses instead on China Proper, of which the most crowded parts are the North China Plain and Sichuan (formerly Szechwan).

http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/pubs/gdp/pop/gif/easiac.gif

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The North China Plain, corresponding to the basin of the lower Yellow River, wraps around the Shandong (“Eastern Mountain”) Peninsula and the province of the same name, outlined here. Most of the Plain, apart from that peninsula, falls into the adjoining provinces of Hebei and Henan. (Those names translate as “North of the River” and “South of the River”). Yes, the name Shanxi means “Western Mountain.”

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The Chinese recognize several urban clusters. One, around Beijing, is called Jingjinji and has a population of 112 million. There’s another around the Yangtze Delta, and it has a population of 152 million. A third, at the Pearl River Delta, seems almost seems puny at only 60 million. The most crowded part of the U.S. has a bit over 50 million people spread from Boston to D.C.

https://www.economist.com/china/2018/06/23/china-is-trying-to-turn-itself-into-a-country-of-19-super-regions

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Sichuan has been relatively prosperous for a long time. Today it’s wealth is mostly a story of the boomtowns of Chengdu and Chongqing, but historically the engine of wealth was Dujiangyan, an artificial cut in the bank of the Min River, a tributary of the Yangtze. The water is heading into irrigation canals.

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Here’s a patch of the land the canal irrigates.

Paddy would be the chief subsistence crop, but farmers today want money. In this case, the owner was growing orchids for sale in Chengdu hotels.

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He was pretty entrepreneurial and had put together some advertising brochures.

His house.

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Tool storage.

Kitchen. Do you see a story of rising expectations here? The owner wasn’t content to live as his parents did.

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Here’s Dujiangyan on a map of the Red Basin. We’re going to run about three hours southwest to Neijiang.

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Think it’s a cute traditional village? Not quite.

But just a couple of miles outside town things get quiet fast.

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Sweet potatoes, corn, and maybe peanuts.

Farmhouses, too, brick and in clusters. Look prosperous?

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Certainly the houses are large and solidly made. Here’s a local shop, convenient but with nothing fancy or even refrigerated.

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And here’s a young woman going home after making a milk delivery. No high heels.

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Japan’s three biggest metros are all on the island of Honshu. (That name means “main province”.) The cities that show up here in red are, east to west, Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. They lie on an arc of dense settlement that stretches along the east coast of the island and jumps across the Strait of Shimonoseki to the northern tip of the island of Kyushu. (That name means “nine provinces”.) The mountainous spine of Honshu is sparsely settled, as are the other two main islands, Hokkaido in the north and Shikoku near Kyushu and nestled in the Inland Sea. Those two islands have about five million people each, while Kyushu has about 13 million. That leaves Honshu with slightly over 100 million.

http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~yichuanshi/geog3000/maps.htm

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Japan was once an agrarian society, and its attachment to farming and rice in particular can hardly be exaggerated. Here we’re at Tokyo’s main airport, which is surrounded by farmland, treed on the uplands and in neat paddy fields along the streams. But see the tiny dark, coffin-shaped patch in the middle of the taxiways?

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It’s one of a half-dozen bits of farmland that protesters have held onto as they resisted the airport’s construction and expansion. The courts are slowly, slowly ordering their removal, and the protesters are gradually dying of old age, but the movement in its early years was extraordinarily violent. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJMB01iscM0

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Farther out from the airport, settlement is thick, although most of the residents here are no longer farming.

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Here is a dramatic rendering of the whole picture. It’s misleading because of its perspective. In other words, Singapore doesn’t have as many people as New York City. In fact, the whole map is weird because it’s curved to look like part of the globe yet, by flattening, it shows the whole globe. Still it’s a useful reminder that Americans are demographically peripheral to the crowded world, which hugs the warm rim of Eurasia.

http://urbandemographics.blogspot.com/2011/09/population-density-maps.html