Useless fact of the day.

[randomness]

Somerville, Massachusetts is more densely populated than Hong Kong.

*7,019.3 people per square kilometer for Somerville, 6,380 for the Hong Kong S.A.R.

Comments

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Hellz to the yes!

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I believe it. (Never been to Hong Kong though.)

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

... and about half the income per capita.

[frotz.livejournal.com]

Given the New Territories, that doesn't seem surprising; there's still a whole lot of nothing up there. FWIW, just HK Island (which has its own share of green space) is at 16,390/km², and Kowloon's population density is 43,033/km².

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

No argument on the New Territories.

For what it's worth, both Somerville and the S.A.R. are more densely populated than Gibraltar, at 4,328/km². But Singapore (7,315/km²) is more densely populated than either.

After a while this gets meaningless, because the population density of the chair I'm sitting on right now is much, much higher than even Kowloon's population density.

I did say it was a useless fact of the day. :)

[julianyap.livejournal.com]

Yay Singapore. Er...

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I find that really shocking. Are the ocean bits of Hong Kong included in the calculation of its area?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Less than 5% of the area listed in Wikipedia is water, so I think it's just the fresh water reservoirs in that number.

The thing people outside Hong Kong don't generally know about it is that it has a lot of reserved landfor parks and nature preserves out in the New Territories and on the Outlying Islands. People think of Kowloon and Hong Kong island, which are clearly very densely built, but there's more space for hiking trails and other outdoor recreation than people think.

For example, there's a wetland reserve in the far northwest which the World Wide Fund for Nature manages which I hope to visit with bedfull_o_books next time we're both in town as it is a great place to go birding.