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Well if you count the area where Geno's is to be "downtown Philly", then sure. Meanwhile, downtown Chicago is so much larger than Philly that whereas Philly has residential rowhouse neighborhoods from that point on the map to the 3-5 block wide area that is definitely a "downtown", Chicago would have straight skyscrapers, many of them office buildings, from there all the way to past Market St and well beyond. Put a lake on the other side of Market St so that Philly doesn't get to count residential rowhouse neighborhoods 2 miles north as Center City/Downtown, and then add a park the size of Millennium Park/Grant Park right in the center of the central business district.
I think this report is confusing "smaller city with smaller downtown seamlessly integrated with miles upon miles of rowhouse neighborhoods" with "much larger city with much larger downtown that crams in far more office space, retail, hotels, and institutional space and has far more incoming transit connections and highways and unused land with no room for purely residential neighborhoods and yet still has about as many residents within the same kind of area".
Well if you count the area where Geno's is to be "downtown Philly", then sure. Meanwhile, downtown Chicago is so much larger than Philly that whereas Philly has residential rowhouse neighborhoods from that point on the map to the 3-5 block wide area that is definitely a "downtown", Chicago would have straight skyscrapers, many of them office buildings, from there all the way to past Market St and well beyond. Put a lake on the other side of Market St so that Philly doesn't get to count residential rowhouse neighborhoods 2 miles north as Center City/Downtown, and then add a park the size of Millennium Park/Grant Park right in the center of the central business district.
I think this report is confusing "smaller city with smaller downtown seamlessly integrated with miles upon miles of rowhouse neighborhoods" with "much larger city with much larger downtown that crams in far more office space, retail, hotels, and institutional space and has far more incoming transit connections and highways and unused land with no room for purely residential neighborhoods and yet still has about as many residents within the same kind of area".
Having a larger skyline doesn't automatically mean it has a larger downtown. Skylines can go far beyond downtown areas(as Chicago is a great example of that). Chicago's downtown is great but it's smaller than Philly's downtown area. It doesn't make Chicago any less of a city but it is what it is.
It would be interesting to see the central contiguous 6-8 sq-miles of peer cities: Bos, SF, Chi, and maybe LA. This 2nd largest downtown designation seems to suffer from somewhat arbitrary construction.
For Los Angeles it would vary heavily on which neighborhoods you took. If you included areas like Westlake and Chinatown, it would be among the top 3-4 I would imagine. If you included only areas within the freeway loop and tacked on areas to the south or east, it could drop all the way to 9-10.
In reality it is probably somewhere in the 7-8 range for the population of its true downtown, which is less than 6-8 miles. It's definitely going to be unseating some of the cities ahead of it, simply because it has so much room to keep growing and adding residential units. I just don't see how a place like Boston can significantly increase its downtown population at a similar rate to DTLA considering how built-out it is (and how it is not really a high-rise residential city).
RE: OP - that is awesome for Philly and no big surprise, considering just how residential in nature its core is. If Los Angeles could replace every one story warehouse in downtown for a one story rowhouse, maybe it could be there too!
You're talking about an area of 8 square miles? That's really pushing it. lol
Agreed. Girard to Tasker is pushing it. However, I really don't understand why they don't include University City in the "Downtown definition." Including Center City and University City, Downtown Philadelphia would rank about 4.18 square miles.
Within this area includes the 50,000 University City population and ~90,000 Center City population or approx. 140,000 in total.
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