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This is from Bluefield, West Virginia. Its surprising this city even has a skyline AT ALL. The population in the city limits is 10,000, with 100,000 in the metropolitan area which spans WV and VA covering mostly small rural towns and coal country. This is an interesting place actually and there is a lot of abandonment and the population USED to be larger when the coal industry was doing better. It has abandoned skyscrpers like Detroit.
And here's Charleston, West Virginia. It actually has a more impressive skyline than the much larger and more famous Charleston in South Carolina since they probably has building codes and laws preventing the construction of high rises in order to preserve the historic charm there.
Last edited by Tom Lennox 70; 12-02-2013 at 12:42 AM..
http://money.usnews.com/dbimages/mas...shreveport.jpg - Shreveport, Louisiana. Population is only around 450,000 in the metro area and 200,000 in the city. I think it stood in for Kansas City (which is 2-3 times its size) in the movie "Snitch" with Dwayne Johnson.
Skyline seems to be more about a city's economy and isolation from other cities - this means more businesses will build HQs downtown. That's why almost every Canadian and Australian city has a huge skyline, even though the cities are pretty small by US standards. Towns built around large military bases tend to have very low skylines for their size. Just look at Pensacola, Huntsville, Columbus (GA), or San Antonio and compare them to cities of a similar size.
Last edited by Hamtonfordbury; 12-02-2013 at 06:21 AM..
Sure, then while we are at it, Miami should be considered, and also Manhattan, which has the world's greatet skyline, and all with slightly less than 3M people.
Metro pops. HAVE TO be considered here since they supply the workforce for these "small city" downtowns.
Yeah I see people naming that Miami has only a pop of 400k or Atlanta has a pop of 500k. Their skyline represent the entire metro area more than the actual city. It's exactly why Miami has a more impressive skyline than Jacksonville even though Jacksonville is actually the largest city in Miami by over 600,000 people. Miami looks like a skyline in a metro of 5 million. Jacksonville looks like a skyline in a metro of just over 1 million.
If you look at the entire metro area then Atlantic City NJ, Bluefield WV/VA and Charleston WV would still have impressive skylines.
I think there is less suburban sprawl in Canada. The London, ON metro area has 460,000 people but 360,000 or so live in the city, vs in Atlanta you have 400,000 in the city limits and millions in the metro area. I think Canada really pushes high density development and restricts suburban expansion so the cities would be more compact and high rise.
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