Land/built-up
Using 'population' data to estimate built-up land
Some inner cities can be quite dense, but even the less-dense suburbs are still fully built-up, as none of the land is truly wilderness
Let's estimate the minimum population density that might be considered fully built-up land:
Do Minimum Lot Size Rules Matter? - Strong Towns www.strongtowns.org › journal › do-minimum-lot-size-rules-matter
This is just an educated guess, so if you have actual data, please say it in the Template:TALKPAGENAME.
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So, any land with more people than this, would be considered 100% built-up land in our analysis.
Any land with fewer people, will be counted proportionally. So if the population density is 10% of the threshold, we say the area contains 10% built-up land. This might be the case of a small family farm, where 90% of the lot is farm land, and the last 10% is housing and driveway.
Technically, there could be fully-built-up areas below this population threshold - such as industrial areas - but those are probably uncommon enough.
Let's test out our threshold using the image generator:
pop << data/population.data-float64-8640x4320 # population counts pop @@ quantity_to_density # convert to 'people per km^2' pop /= 5000 # threshold for land to be considered 'fully built-up' pop <= 1 pop @@ density_to_quantity pop @@ stats
The "sum" (which will appear in the result from the last line) will be the number of km^2 of built-up land on Earth.
Compare this to official estimates...