Globally, the highest figure is close to 200,000, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. England’s most densely populated km², in West London, has just over 20,000 people in it. There are 33 1km² areas across Europe with a population of 40,000 or more: 23 are in Spain, and ten are in France. France also has an area with more than 50,000 people in a single km², in Paris.īarcelona from above: possibly the most densely populated km² in Europe. This also helps explain why Spain has the most densely populated km² in Europe more than 53,000 people inhabit a single 1km² area in Barcelona. In fact, Spain could claim to be the most densely populated major European country by this measure, despite its appearance on the map. So even though the settlement pattern appears sparse, people are actually quite tightly packed together. This means that the “lived density” for Spain is in fact 737 people per km², rather than 93. Spain contains within it more than 505,000 1km squares. Yet characterising Spain as a sparsely populated country does not reflect the experience on the ground – as anyone who knows Barcelona or Madrid can tell you. The reasons for this date back to Medieval times, as Daniel Oto-Peralías at the University of St Andrews has explained. This is borne out in the map, where much of Spain appears to be empty much more so than any other large European country. It has a population density of 93 people per km², giving the impression of a sparsely populated country. The Spanish distributionĪ good way to understand this measure is to look at Spain. I call this figure “lived density”, since it provides a way of seeing the kinds of population densities that people experience in their day-to-day lives, within built-up areas. This is the so-called “ blue banana”, or dorsale européenne (European backbone), identified by French geographer Roger Brunet in 1989, and it is home to more than 110m people.īut we can get further clarity still by honing in on “built-up” density, which takes into account only those 1km² areas with people living in them. For example, we can see an area of high population density extending in a rough arc from north-west England down to Milan, with a little break in the Alps. This bird’s eye view helps us to understand the wider context.
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