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Small But Densely Populated American Cities & the Transformation of Cudahy, CA

Article-Grid, North America, Population Geography, Urban geography / By

The list of the most densely populated incorporated cities in the United States has some interesting features. The top four entries are all small cities (less than 1.5 mi sq; fewer than 70,000 inhabitants) located just to the west of Manhattan in Hudson County, New Jersey. Three of the top 11 – Kaser, New Square, and Kiryas Joel – are relatively new towns in the New York metropolitan area that are entirely or primarily inhabited by Hasidic Jews. All three have high fertility rates and low levels of per capita income. According to Wikipedia, “Kiryas Joel has the highest poverty rate in the nation” while New Square is “the poorest town (measured by median income) in New York, and the eighth poorest in the United States.”

One surprising revelation in the city-density list is the large number of thickly populated cities that were originally established as low-density suburbs of Los Angeles. Of the 140 U.S. cities with more than 10,000 people per square mile, 28 are in the Los Angeles region. Although still conventionally imagined as a low-density, suburban environment, the L.A. region has been densifying for decades. The sprawling city of Los Angeles itself, covering some 469 mi sq, is now moderately dense by U.S. standards. As the density map of southern Los Angeles County posted below shows, central L.A. is now heavily inhabited, with many census tracts reporting more than 30,000 people per mi sq. Quite a few outlying tracts also post high figures. Many of these areas do not appear at first glance to be densely populated, as they are dominated by low-rise buildings and include many detached, single-family houses. But the number of persons living in each dwelling unit can be high, particularly in areas with large numbers of recent migrants.

Several of small, densely populated cities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in the northwestern quadrant of a cluster of municipalities known as the “Gateway Cities.” I have enclosed the northern portion of this “Gateway” area on maps posted above and below, excluding the relatively large city of Long Beach. The crowded little cities in this region are relatively poor and have large immigrant populations. In 2019, Business Insider placed Huntington Park in the lowest position in California on its “misery index” and in the tenth lowest nationally. The Wikipedia article on Maywood estimates that one-third of [its] residents live in the U.S. without documentation.” Maywood is also notable for being “the first municipality in California to outsource all of its city services, dismantling its police department, laying off all city employees except for the city manager, city attorney and elected officials, and contracting with outside agencies for the provision of all municipal services.”

The evolution of tiny but densely packed Cudahy, with almost 23,000 residents living in 1.18 mi sq, is particularly interesting. Cudahy was originally designed as a semi-rural garden city. Its founder and namesake, the wealthy meat-packing entrepreneur Michael Cudahy, purchased a large ranch in 1908, which he subdivided and sold off in one-acre lots. As explained in the Wikipedia article on the city:

These “Cudahy lots” were notable for their size—in most cases, 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 m) in width and 600 to 800 feet (183 to 244 m) in depth, at least equivalent to a city block in most American towns. Such parcels, often referred to as “railroad lots,” were intended to allow the new town’s residents to keep a large vegetable garden, a grove of fruit trees (usually citrus), and a chicken coop or horse stable.

Although gardens, orchards, and farm animals are long gone, the old “Cudahy lots” may still be visible in satellite images (see the image below; I was not, however, able to find a map of the original city lots). At any rate, Cudahy gradually morphed into a crowded industrial town, giving it a legacy of environmental contamination. As noted by the Wikipedia article cited above:

On January 14, 2020, delta Airlines flight 89 dumped jet fuel  Cudahy, while making an emergency landing at Los Angeles International airport. Park Avenue Elementary School suffered the brunt of this dumping. This incident sparked outrage because of the city’s previous history of environmental damage, including the construction of the same school on top of an old dump site that contained contaminated soil with toxic sludge, and pollution from the Exide battery plant.

As a final note, it is intriguing that the two main clusters of small, high-density cities in the United States are located immediately adjacent to the country’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles. Populous though they are, these two cities have markedly different built environments and settlement histories. New York is well known for its high population density, but Los Angeles is more commonly regarded as a low-density city anchoring an even lower-density metropolitan area. That vision is longer justifiable.

Capturing the Size and Density of New York City and Environs on a Map of Major U.S. Cities

Article-Grid, North America, Urban geography / By

As mentioned in the previous post, depictions of the population density of major U.S. cities tend to under-emphasize the significance of New York City. New York is clearly the most densely inhabited major city in the United States, with 29,303 people per mi sq (in 2020), a figure that far overshadows that of second-place San Francisco (18,631). San Francisco, moreover, makes a poor comparison, as its total population is more than an order of magnitude less than that of New York (808,437 vs. 8,335,897 in 2022).

The population concentration found in the core areas of New York City is also masked by the relatively low density of some of its outlying areas, particularly of Staten Island. With a population of 8,618 per mi sq (in 2020), Staten Island is comparable in this regard to Los Angeles (8,304.22 per mi sq). In contrast, Brooklyn – which would be the country’s second most populous city if the boroughs of New York had never amalgamated – had a population density of 39,438 per mi sq in 2020, a far higher figure than that of San Francisco. But it is Manhattan that really stands out. Its 1,694,251 residents (2020) are crowded into a mere 22.83 square miles, giving it a density of 74,781 people per sq mi. A century earlier, Manhattan had been even more densely populated. When its population peaked at 2,331,542 in 1910, its density exceeded 100,000 people per mi sq, a figure that makes San Francisco seem sparsely settled in comparison.

In short, when it comes to both urban population size and density in the United States, New York City is in a league of its own, with no real competition. To illustrate this situation, I have redrafted two of the maps that were used to illustrate the previous GeoCurrents post. In the new versions (below), New York is broken down into its five constituent boroughs. A new density scheme was required as well, as four of New York’s five boroughs monopolize the top three categories in the new 2022 map. As the redrafted 1950 map shows, Queens and especially Staten Island were much less densely inhabited than the other boroughs at the time. This map highlights the significance of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and especially Manhattan as the country’s most densely populated urban places in the mid-twentieth century.

But even this redrafted map does not adequately capture the elevated population densities found in the greater New York City region. As the table of the most densely populated incorporated cities in the United States (posted below) reveals, New York City itself ranks in only the sixth position. The four cities with the highest density are all in Hudson County, New Jersey, immediately to the west of Manhattan. The largest city in Hudson County – Jersey City – is not on this list. But if cities that cover very small areas (below five square miles) are excluded, Jersey City ranks in the second position. Yonkers, which is immediately north of the Bronx, also makes this list of the most densely populated sizable U.S. cities. To reflect this concentration of dense urbanism in the New York metro area, I have edited the map once more, this time including Hudson County and Yonkers.

 

One more GeoCurrents post will examine population density in American cities. After that, this blog will turn to the recent elections in New Zealand and Poland before returning to the historical development of the urban system of the United States.

U.S. City Size, Density, & Population Change, 1950 to 2022 – and the Dream of the “15-Minute City”

Article-Grid, Historical Geography, North America, Urban geography / By

Many environmentalists now advocate the development of “15-minute cities,” urban areas dense enough to allow residents “to access most of the places [they] need to go within a 15-minute walk or bike.” This vision has much to recommend it. Many people find neighborhoods of this sort deeply attractive, both as places to live and visit. I count myself among them. My ideal living arrangement would be to divide my time between an apartment in such a city and a house in a remote rural area. Instead, like most Americans, I live in a medium-density suburban environment – which sometimes seems to offer the worst of both worlds.

But although I understand the appeal of 15-minute cities, I also recognize that creating them would be extraordinarily difficult if not impossible in the United States. Evidence from both polling and actual residential choice indicates that most Americans dislike dense cities and prefer suburban living. Ironically, moreover, environmentalists themselves are one of the main obstacles to the urban intensification that such a vision requires. Construction projects of all sorts, after all, often face environmental lawsuits, which can bring them to a quick halt.

An equally severe problem is the fact that the few cities in the United States that approach the required degree of walkability have been deintensifying, shedding residents over the past several years. From 2020 to 2022, New York City lost 3.5 percent of its population, Philadelphia 2.3, Chicago 3.0, and San Francisco a shocking 7.5. This decline was at first mostly a matter of people fleeing crowded conditions during the COVID pandemic, but it is now being driven primarily by safety and property-security concerns. For the same reasons, many of the mass-transit systems that are required for urban intensification are losing ridership and find themselves financially troubled. As a result, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, at least in the United States, the 15-minute city is little more than a fond dream.

Some of the maps that I have been making for my prospective historical atlas of urban development in the United States might prove useful in examining the urban growth and density issues surrounding the 15-minute city idea. These maps, to be sure, are unusual, as they depict no geographical features beyond city size and density. The spatial patterns that they show are also wildly distorted. As a result, they might more properly be regarded as graphic visualizations. But I still view them as maps, as all GeoCurrents posts focus on map explication.

The first map shows the size, density, and rough relative locations of the twenty most populous cities, as formally defined, in the United States in 2022. The numbers in the bottom corners of each urban polygon indicate the population growth rate, in percentage terms, of that city from 2010 to 2020 (left) and from 2020 to 2022 (righ). As can be seen, most large American cities lost population in the latter period. More important, such losses were concentrated in more densely inhabited cities. Several of the more sparsely settled cities, in contrast, gained population during this period. But as can also be seen, all these cities added residents from 2010 to 2020, some of them to a significant degree. This was true even in the country’s most densely inhabited urban areas. New York grew in this period by 7.7 percent and San Francisco by 8.5 percent. But with the exceptions of Seattle and Denver, all cities expanding by more than ten percent from 2010 to 2020 are characterized by low population density.

The overall impression conveyed by this map is one of low population density in America’s largest cities. Some of them have annexed such extensive suburban and rural hinterlands that they do not really count as cities in the informal sense. Jacksonville, Florida, for example, consolidated with Duval County in 1968, and as a result, its 971,319 residents live in a “city” that sprawls over 874.46 sq mi. This gives Jacksonville a population density of 1,270.73/sq mi, a figure lower than that of the typical American inner suburb. The contrast between Jacksonville and San Francisco is instructive. Although the city of San Francisco is also consolidated with its county, its population density is of an entirely different magnitude. In 2022, San Francisco’s 808,437 residents inhabited an area of 46.9 sq mi, giving it a density of 17,237.5/sq mi. But if San Francisco is thickly populated by U.S. standards, it is not by that of New York City. In 2020, Manhattan had 1,694,251 residents living in an area of 22.83 sq mi, giving it a density of 74,780.7/sq mi.

As the next map shows, in 1950 the 20 largest cities in the United States were considerably denser that those of 2022. 1950 was arguably the heyday of American urbanism. Driven in part by the war-economy of the first half of the decade, all large U.S. cities grew during the preceding census interval, some by considerable margins. Extremely rapid growth occurred both in sparsely inhabited cities (see Houston on the map below) and in densely settled ones such as San Francisco and Washington, DC.

Seven cities are found on the lists of the 20 largest U.S. cities in both 1950 and 2022. As can be seen on the map posted below, the country’s two densest major cities, New York and San Francisco, experienced relatively little change in either population size or density in the intervening 72 years. Two relatively densely settled cities, Chicago and Philadelphia, saw significant populations losses in the same period, reducing their densities. In contrast, two West Coast cities, Seattle and Los Angeles, experienced major increases in both population and density. Houston, in contrast, saw a huge population increase but did not more into a higher population-density category, as it also expanded in area.

The next map, indicating population size but not density, shows which cities dropped out of the top-20 list between 1950 and 2022 and which ones were added to it. The geographical pattern seen here is stark but not surprising. Except for New Orleans, all the “drop-out” cities are in the northeastern quadrant of the country. In contrast, with the exceptions of Indianapolis and Columbus, all the additions are in the southern half of the country. Interestingly, Columbus has many attributes of a sunbelt city, although it experiences very little sunshine from November through March. The concentration of emergent, low-density, large cities in Texas is also noteworthy.

The final map addresses a question that probably crossed the minds of some readers: where are such major cities as Atlanta or Miami? With just under half a million residents, Atlanta is not a particularly large city, although its metropolitan area certainly is. The same patterns holds for Miami. The map below thus shows the locations (but not the populations) of cities that anchor metropolitan areas in the top 30 by population in 2022, but did not themselves place in the top-20 city lists of either 1950 or 2022. It is not coincidental that three of the eight are in booming Florida.

The first two maps in this post are somewhat misleading, as they do not adequately convey the population density of New York. To do so properly, the city must be broken down into its five constituent boroughs. This will be done for the next GeoCurrents post.

Mapping the Development of the Urban Framework of the United States, 1790-1830

Article-Grid, Historical Geography, North America, Population Geography / By

I am currently working on an online historical atlas of the development of the urban framework of the United States. The maps and commentaries that will constitute this atlas will be posted gradually over the next few weeks or months, interspersed with regular GeoCurrents posts. The first of these installments, showing the situation in 1840 and outlining the “Philadelphia problem,” appeared on October 13, 2023. Today’s post examines the development of the network of cities in the United States from 1790 to 1830. The population figures in today’s post, like that of October 13, are derived from a Wikipedia article called “List of Most Populous Cities in the United States by Decade.” In subsequent posts, covering the period after 1840, a more comprehensive data source will be used.

The United States had few cities of any size in 1790. New York City tops the conventional list, with 33,131 inhabitants, and Philadelphia comes in second, with 28,522. But Philadelphia at the time was limited to what is now called Center City. If one includes what were then the separate cities of Southwark and Northern Liberties District, which were annexed in 1854, Philadelphia ranks first, with a population of 44,096, and is mapped accordingly.  As can be seen on the map posted below, the country’s main cities – or towns, in one prefers – of the time were all ports, located on the coast or along estuaries. Except for Charleston, South Carolina, all of them were in the greater northeast. The prominence of New England on this map, with more than half of the cities depicted, will not persist into the 1800s as the urban center of gravity shifts south into the Mid-Atlantic states.

The largest cities on the 1790 list significantly expanded from 1790 to 1800, with New York growing from 33,131 to 60,514, Baltimore from 13,503 to 26,514, and Boston from 18,320 to 24,937. Philadelphia, in the larger sense, still vies with New York for top position. Norfolk, Virginia appears on this map, but the year 1800 marks its only inclusion in the top-ten list.

The rapid expansion of the country’s largest cities is a persistent feature of these maps. By 1810, the population of New York City approached 100,000. By this time, New York was clearly the country’s largest city, a position that it will retain and amplify in the following decades. The 1810 map includes the first truly inland city, Albany, New York. Located on the Hudson River, Albany’s appearance reflects the growing importance of trade with the interior. More important is the inclusion of New Orleans on the southern Mississippi, which became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

In 1820, Albany drops of the map, replaced by Washington DC, which had 13,247 inhabitants in that year. But as the nation’s capital experienced relatively slow growth after this period, it falls off the top-ten list in 1830 and does not reappear until 1950. In the early nineteenth century, Washington was derisively called “the city of magnificent distances” due to its small number of residents living in an urban framework designed for a larger population. In 1842, Charles Dickens claimed that “Its streets begin in nothing and lead nowhere.” The fact that capital of the United States was such a small city reflects the limited extent of the federal government before the Civil War. As its constituent states were arguably more important than the country itself, the common locution at the time was “The United States are…,” rather than “the United States is… .”

The major changes on the map of 1830 reflect the opening of the Erie Canal (the dotted blue line on the map) in 1825. The Erie Canal facilitated the emergence of an extensive water-based transportation network, linking the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, and, by extension, to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Not surprisingly, Albany reappears on the 1930 map. More important, Cincinnati emerges as the first significant Midwestern city. Cincinnati will remain in the top-ten list until 1910. Today, with a population of 309,51, it ranks in the 64th position, surpassed by a few suburbs of little historical significance. In the early and mid-1800s, however, Cincinnati was a major and rapidly growing city, due in part to its role in butchering and processing hogs for the national market. This industry was so important that the city was deemed “Porkopolis.” As is explained in a 2016 Cincinnati Magazine article:

“Porkopolis” is one of the names by which Cincinnati is known, and its origin is explained in the following manner: About 1825 George W. Jones, president of the United States branch-bank, and known as “Bank Jones,” was very enthusiastic about the fact that 25,000 to 30,000 hogs were being killed in this city every year; and in his letters to the bank’s Liverpool correspondent he never failed to mention the fact, and express his hope of Cincinnati’s future greatness as a provision-market. The correspondent, after receiving a number of these letters, had a unique pair of model hogs made of papier mache, and sent them to George W. Jones as the worthy representative of ‘Porkopolis.’”

… Frances “Fanny” Trollope is infamous for publishing a scathing indictment of Cincinnati in her 1832 book “Domestic Manners of the Americans”. A great deal of her bile is directed at our pigs:

“If I determined upon a walk up Main-street, the chances were five hundred to one against my reaching the shady side without brushing by a snout fresh dipping from the kennel; when we had screwed our courage to the enterprise of mounting a certain noble-looking sugar-loaf hill, that promised pure air and a fine view, we found the brook we had to cross, at its foot, red with the stream from a pig slaughterhouse while our noses, instead of meeting ‘the thyme that loves the green hill’s breast,’ were greeted by odours that I will not describe, and which I heartily hope my readers cannot imagine.”

It is not coincidental that the Procter & Gamble Company is headquartered in Cincinnati. As explained in Encyclopedia Britannica:

The company was formed in 1837 when William Procter, a British candlemaker, and James Gamble, an Irish soapmaker, merged their businesses in Cincinnati. The chief ingredient for both products was animal fat, which was readily available in the hog-butchering centre of Cincinnati. The company supplied soap and candles to the Union Army during the American Civil War and sold even more of these products to the public when the war was over.

Although candles are now usually made of wax, historically they were mostly made from animal fat. In earlier times, only prosperous people could afford wax candles.

Mapping the Population of U.S. Cities in 1840 – and the Philadelphia Problem

Article-Grid, Population Geography / By

I am currently working on a large set of GeoCurrents maps that will depict the current and historical demographic patterns of U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. Several problems, however, have arisen in data selection and visualization. Most troublesome is the gradual amalgamation of separate municipalities into single cities.

Consider, for example, a map showing the locations and populations of the six largest U.S. cities in 1840 (below). It might be surprising that Philadelphia, considering its historical importance, appears as only the fourth largest, surpassed in population by Baltimore and New Orleans. But this depiction is misleading.  As it turns out, 5 of the 37 American cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants in 1840 are now mere neighborhoods of Philadelphia. New York City, as it is currently conceptualized and legally defined, was also larger than it appears on the map.  In 1840, it did not include Brooklyn, which was then the country’s seventh largest city. Boston was larger as well, as it did not then include Charlestown (see the table below).

To address this problem, I have revised the map by amalgamating what were then separate municipalities with the nearby cities that later annexed them. I did so, however, only for cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants. If smaller cities were subjected to the same treatment, the map might have to be revised again. But regardless of such difficulties, it can be clearly seen that Philadelphia was the country’s second city in 1840, with a population more than twice that of Baltimore.

The final map includes all cities (that currently exist as cities) that had more than 10,000 inhabitants in 1840. As can be seen, almost all were linked to transportation networks, serving as ports on seacoasts, estuaries, or rivers. Several are located on the Erie Canal (shown as a dotted blue line), again illustrating the importance of waterways in the pre-railroad era, which quickly coming to an end. Lowell, in northeastern Massachusetts (mapped in a light shade of red), is an interesting exception, as it emerged as a planned industrial city focused on textiles. Located on the rapids of the Merrimack River, which provided power, Lowell is often regarded as the “cradle of the American industrial revolution.”

Insurgency in Paraguay – and Genocidal Agitation Against Brazilians in the Country

Article-Grid, Elections, Insurgencies, Linguistic Geography / By

Wikipedia’s “list of on-going armed conflicts” (see the previous post) had some surprises for me, as it includes a few insurgencies that I had thought were over. One example is that of the Paraguayan People’s Army, or EEP Rebellion (from the Spanish label, Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo). Wikipedia gives a 2023 death toll of seven for this conflict, and a cumulative count of 145+ since its beginning in 2005. These figures do not seem to be reliable, however, as the listed source for the 2023 figure is from 2022. I was not able to find any information on deaths this year in an admittedly cursory internet search. The Wikipedia article on the EEP, however, emphasizes its continuing activity, claiming that it can field up to 1,000 militants. As the article notes:

[T]he EPP has millions of dollars collected in kidnappings, extortion, expropriations and even contributions from neighbors and supporters. To this day, they continue to gain followers in the area, given the void left by the Paraguayan State.

The EEP is in many respects a typical Latin American Marxist-Leninist insurgency. It aims its attacks on wealthy landowners and security official, both private and public. Its operations have been focused in the central-eastern part of the country not far from the boundary with Brazil (see the map below), a restive region that has seen the development of large, mechanized farms over the past few decades. A few years ago, the EEP gained some global notoriety for kidnapping Mennonite farmers, one of whom was killed when his family was unable to come up with the $500,000 demanded for his release.

Conflict over land use and ownership in eastern Paraguay is an issue of the political far-right as well as the far-left. In Paraguay’s April 2023 general election, the populist and self-described nationalist-anarchist candidate of the National Crusade Party, Paraguayo “Payo” Cubas, surprised many observers by coming in third place, taking almost a quarter of the votes cast. In 2019, then-senator Cubas was impeached after he called for the genocide of Brazilians living in his country. As reported by Folha de São Paulo:

Brazilian bandits, bandits! Invaders! Now deforesting the country,” he shouts. “At least 100,000 Brazilians must be killed here,” he continued, mentioning that 2 million Brazilians are living in the country. The Brazilian government estimates that there are 350 thousand.

Following his failed bid for the presidency, Cubas was arrested for “disturbing the peace” after he refused to accept the election results and led anti-governmental protests. This was not the first time that he found himself in legal trouble. In 2016, Cubas was arrested “after hitting a judge with a belt and defecating in the office of the judge’s secretary.”

The large Brazilian presence in eastern Paraguay dates to the 1960s. These so-called “Brasiguayos” (“Brasiguaios” in Portuguese), many of whom were born in Paraguay, are now thought to number around half a million, a little less than 10 percent of the country’s population. They form the dominant group in several border towns, which are now mostly Portuguese speaking. This fact is almost never noted on language maps of Paraguay, although I did find one somewhat dated example (posted below). This map, not surprisingly, comes from the extensive archives of Reddit’s “Map Porn” community.

The initial Brazilian immigrants in Paraguay were mostly landless peasants who cleared the land for agriculture. They were later followed by well-off farmers who developed mechanized, commercial agriculture, usually focusing on soybeans. As commercial farmers moved in, many of the earlier migrants were forced back to Brazil, where they often found themselves unwelcome. Settling mostly in the new agricultural areas of Matto Grosso do Sul, their plight gained the attention of Amnesty International, which claimed in a 1992 report that were the victims of “illegal detentions, allegations of excessive use of force by the police, intimidation and a possible extra judicial execution.” The irony inherent in the situation has been noted. As one author put it, “Brazilians living in Paraguay wound up being expelled by their own countrymen.”

Anti-Brazilian agitation in Paraguay over the past few decades has generally focused on landownership issues. It seems to have reached a peak between 2008 and 2012, when Paraguay was under a leftwing government, an unusual condition in that country. As noted in a 2012 article in Gazeta do Povo:

The epicenter of the most recent agrarian conflict in Paraguay is located 75 kilometers from Foz do Iguaçu, in the department of Alto Paraná. A group of 6,000 landless Paraguayans, called “carperos”, have been camped for almost a year in the municipality of Ñacunday, on the border between two rural properties owned by producers of Brazilian descent. They threaten to take by force an area of 167,000 hectares spread across the departments of Alto Paraná, Canindeyú and Itapúa on the border with Brazil and Argentina. Armed and willing to radicalize the movement, they claim that the lands occupied by Brazilians belong to the Paraguayan government and should serve the agrarian reform project undertaken by President Fernando Lugo.

Cultural and even racial issue are also at play. As reported in a 2001 New York Times article:

They complain that the only television available locally is Brazilian and that their children grow up rooting for Brazil’s national soccer team instead of their own and speaking Portuguese as their second language instead of the Indian language Guaraní [Note: Paraguay is almost completely bilingual in Spanish and Guaraní].

Radio broadcasts in Guaraní urging landless peasants to rise against the Brazilians continue to be heard here. About 80 percent of San Alberto’s 23,000 residents are of Brazilian descent, and by voting as a bloc they have succeeded in electing one of their number, Romildo Maia de Souza, as mayor. …

One source of friction, all sides agree, is racial. Many of the Brazilians are blue-eyed, fair-skinned descendants of the German, Italian and Polish immigrants who flocked to Brazil’s three southernmost states a century ago. Many of the native-born Paraguayans most resentful of the Brazilian presence are of [indigenous] Indian stock.

Finally, geopolitical implications further complicate the situation. A 2019 scholarly paper by Andrew Nickson warns that Paraguay might be a Brazilian “protectorate in the making,” which seem a bit exaggerated. A big up-coming issue in this regard is the renegotiation of the Itaipú Treaty, which covers the shared Itaipú dam, the third largest hydroelectric facility in the world.

Mapping Recent War Fatalities and the Persistence of Current Armed Conflicts

Article-Grid, Insurgencies, World / By

As noted in the previous GeoCurrent post, the civil war in Burma/Myanmar is one of the bloodiest conflicts in the world today. According to a comprehensive Wikipedia table, its death toll thus far in 2023 is 10,790, the fourth highest in the world. It follows only the Ukraine-Russia war (83,637-100,000+), the war in Sudan (11,501), and the multifaceted insurgency in the Maghreb/Sahel (10,868). Given the rapidly mounting number of fatalities in the current war between Israel and Hamas, however, the rankings for 2023 will probably have to be revised. In any event, in 2022 Burma had the third highest death count if one uses the upper range of estimates found in the table (20,206, as opposed to 109,600+ in Ethiopia and 100,000+ in Ukraine).

Burma’s civil war is also extraordinarily long-lasting, dating from 1948. The only on-going wars listed by the Wikipedia as having started earlier are the Kurdish insurgency in Iran (1918), the “Jamaican political conflict” (1943), and the insurgency in Kashmir (1947). The article also lists the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Baloch insurgency (in Pakistan and Iran) as having begun in the same year as Burma’s civil war, 1948. As of October 6, 2023 – when this post was initially written – none of these other armed conflicts had been nearly as deadly over the previous 10 months as that of Burma. On October 6, the Wikipedia table provided the following 2023 death tolls for these persistent conflicts: Kurdish insurgency in Iran, 147; Jamaican political conflict, 295; insurgency in Kashmir, 433; Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 287; and Baloch insurgency, 500. As of today, however, it gives the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a fatality count of 1,827. All told, if one combines recent death tolls and conflict duration, Burma’s civil war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem to be the most serious conflicts in the world today.

The Wikipedia article under consideration includes a serviceable map of the “number of combat-related deaths in current or past year” (posted below). It might seem odd to place Mexico in the highest category (more than 10,000 fatalities), but the source includes “drug wars,” an intriguing but questionable move. As the map shows, wars today are concentrated in northern and central Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia, northern South America, Mexico, and Ukraine & Russia. In contrast, East Asia, Central Asia, Europe, southern Africa, southern South America, northern North America, and Oceania (Australia and the Pacific) are nearly free of armed conflicts.

This map, however, as well as the table that was used to generate it, must be regarded as highly approximate. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to consistently and accurately tabulate deaths in armed conflicts. Although the Wikipedia article does an admirable job, it misses some deadly conflicts. It does not list Papua New Guinea, for example, as having experienced any combat-related fatalities over the past two years. In actuality, so-called tribal wars in New Guinea’s highlands are ubiquitous. According to a recent article in The Guardian, more than 150 people died in clashes in one province (Enga) in August 2023 alone.

To help visualize the severity and persistence of current armed conflicts, I made several maps based on the same data found in the Wikipedia article. The first map below is probably the most effective. Rather than shoehorning the data into discrete country-based categories, I placed size-graded stars indicating the 2022 fatality count on the actual location of each conflict, to the extent that that is possible. But it often isn’t, as in the case of the Islamist insurgency in the Maghreb/Sahel, which is listed as occurring in 15 separate countries. At any rate, this map seems more effective at revealing the “clustering” of current conflict than the Wikipedia’s map (posted above). If drug wars are excluded, deadly conflicts in 2022 were concentrated in the “Greater Horn of Africa” (including Yemen), Burma and adjacent parts of South Asia, the northern Middle East proper, central Africa, Nigeria and environs, Afghanistan & Pakistan, and Ukraine.

The map of the duration of current armed conflicts, based on the data in the same Wikipedia table, depicts southern Asia as the area with the most persistent conflicts, followed by Central Africa. The final map shows total fatalities by country in 2021. Whether these maps do a better job of conveying the spatial patterns found in the Wikipedia table than the Wikipedia’s own map is for the reader to decide.

Successful Resistance Against the Regime of Burma (Myanmar) by the Karenni People

Article-Grid, Ethnicity, Insurgencies, Southeast Asia, State Failure / By

The civil war raging in Burma (Myanmar) is one of the world’s longest running conflicts, stretching back to 1948, the year of Burma’s independence from Britain. But as hostilities ebb and flow in both time and place, the current war is dated by some as only having begun in 2021, the year of the country’s most recent military coup and crackdown on civil society. But no matter how one measures it, this struggle is bloody and grim. According to the Wikipedia article on “ongoing armed conflicts,” the Burmese Civil War currently has the third highest death toll of 2023, following only the war in Ukraine and the insurgency in western Africa that stretches across more than a dozen countries. Almost 11,000 people have lost their lives this year alone, with a casualty count of perhaps more than 20,000* in 2022. But despite the ongoing and persistent carnage, this conflict rarely makes the news in the United States.

To follow the Burmese civil war, one can consult Burmese sources, available online in both Burmese and English. I especially recommend The Irrawaddy, produced by Burmese journalists in exile in Thailand. One of its most interesting recent articles highlights the importance of the country’s smallest state, Kayah (formerly Karenni), in successfully taking on the Tatmadaw, the brutal Burmese military. The article claims that resistance fighters in Kayah have killed 2,065 junta soldiers while losing only 153 of their own in the past two years. Leading the charge is the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF), which was formed shortly after the February 2021 coup. Some of its fighters had previously been affiliated with the Burmese military as border guards but switched sides after the military take-over. As The Irrawaddy notes, the “KNDF supports federalism, or power-sharing between the Union and state governments with self-determination and self-administration for ethnic states.” According to one recent report, the Burmese government currently controls only some ten percent of Kayah state (including its capital, Loikaw), with the rest of it either contested (20 percent) or under the control of insurgents (65 percent). If this report and others like it are true, the Wikipedia map posted below is highly inaccurate, or at least out of date, as it significantly exaggerates the extent of governmental control.

Despite the success of their military resistance, the people of Kayah (Karenni) State have experienced intense suffering over the past two and a half years. (For those interested, the assaults on their state are regularly tabulated and mapped in detail by the Karenni Civil Society Network; see the map below). According to one recent report from a different agency:

At least 180,000 Karenni people have been forcibly displaced, which is more than 40 percent of the estimated total Karenni population. …. Some families have been displaced multiple times, as IDP sites come under attack by junta forces. Based on legal analysis of the data collected, the report finds that members of the Burmese military have committed the war crimes of attacking civilians, attacking protected objects, pillaging, murder, torture, cruel treatment, and displacing civilians in Karenni State.

As is often tragically the case in Burma, extremist Buddhist monks have been encouraging military assaults and worse. According to a recent United States Institute of Peace report:

Under the hot sun, a Pa-O monk spoke to the rally and characterized the Karenni people as a lower race, describing the KNDF and the Peoples’ Defense Forces broadly as worse than the Islamic State. Another Pa-O monk called for the burning of Karenni villages if the KNDF did not stop the alleged violence, declaring: “They say it is not a religious war. But our three monks have died.” … These alarming speeches carried themes of ethnic hierarchy, Buddhist nationalism and zealous hatred.

Surprisingly, the “ethnic hierarchy” and “Buddhist nationalism” evident in this monk’s speech do not come in their usual form, which is associated with the majority Burman (Burmese-speaking) population and directed against Muslims and members of the so-called hill tribes. In this case, both the Karenni and their Po-O antagonists are historically regarded as “tribal peoples,” both belonging to the larger Karen ethno-linguistic group, at least as it is sometimes reckoned. But the Pa-O people are almost entirely Buddhist and have aligned closely with the Burmese military, which has pursued a “divide and rule” strategy among the country’s minority populations. The strategy had been largely successful before 2021 but is currently failing. The Karenni, in contrast, are religiously divided, with some following Buddhism, others Christianity (of several sects), and others traditional animism/shamanism. They are also, needless to say, firm opponent of the Burmese military.

The success of little Kayah State in resisting the Burmese military probably has roots in colonial history. Kayah was never integrated in British Burma and largely escaped British rule. In the 1870s, the Kingdom of Burma, having been reduced to a rump state after losing two wars against the British, was trying to expand into upland regions. Threatened by this policy, the tiny principalities of the Karenni people sought help from Britain, leading to an 1875 treaty between the United Kingdom and Burma that recognized their independence. In 1892, however, Karenni leaders agreed to accept a stipend from the British government in return for allowing it some local oversight. But domestic policies remained under the control of local leaders. As a result, the Karenni lands were usually mapped as not falling under direct British rule, the only part of Burma generally given that distinction (see the map below). A fascinating 1931 map, however, classified Karenni State as one of four regions in Burma that were “loosely” administered by the British Raj, with two others depicted as “unadministered” (see below). (Intriguingly, Karenni state was reportedly the world’s largest producer of tungsten in the 1930s; geologists affiliated with the Oxford Burma Project currently hope that political stabilization will eventually allow the reestablishment of extensive commercial mining there and elsewhere in mineral-rich Burma.)

As Burma was preparing for independence after World-War II, it sought to incorporate the Karenni states into its coming union. Its 1947 constitution insisted on the amalgamation of these small indigenous realms into one Burmese state, but also allowed the possibility of secession after a ten-year period. But with independence the following year, as tersely noted by the Wikipedia article on the state, “the Karenni leader U Bee Htu Re was assassinated by central government militia for his opposition to the inclusion of the Karenni in the Union of Burma. An armed uprising swept the state that has continued to the present day.”

Despite its formidable power, the Burmese military (Tatmadaw) does not seem to be doing well in the current conflict. A recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations claims that it has lost half or more of its troops since the 2021 coup, due to death, desertion, or defection, and that it has retreated on several fronts. The Tatmadaw is also evidently having difficulty filling the classes at its military academy. According to one report, the government now has stable control over only around twenty percent of the country’s townships. Due to recent military reversals, the Tatmadaw is now engaging in extensive air attacks, often directed against civilian targets. Such a strategy is of little military significance and greatly intensifies animosity against the regime.

The Council on Foreign Relations report mentioned above also contends that the Burmese government is facing growing international problems:

Even China, which has backed the junta and sees Myanmar as a strategically critical investment destination, is playing both sides of the fence. Beijing has continued to plow money into the country and supplied the military with weapons, despite its pariah status, and it has provided the junta with diplomatic cover at international forums. Yet it has also maintained links with the ethnic militias and their political wings, and its backing of Naypyidaw has grown more tepid as the army continues to lose ground. As for Russia, though it too has supplied the junta with arms, Moscow is facing its own obvious problems right now and may not be able to ship weapons abroad for long.

Due to these reversals, Burma’s military government may be reconsidering its strategy. Or perhaps not. Another article from the United States Institute of Peace nicely summarizes the current situation:

Are conciliatory winds stirring among the leaders of Myanmar’s coup regime, or is the junta engaging in deception and distraction as it struggles on the battlefield against a broad range of resistance forces? The answer is almost certainly the latter. It would not be the first time the ruling generals have sought to stimulate international interest in promoting dialogue solely to enhance their legitimacy abroad.

The End of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and the Continuing Reduction of Armenian-Populated Lands

Article-Grid, Border Disputes, Borders, Self-Declared States / By

Let us begin with a paradox: “On September 20, 2023, the world political map underwent a significant change, but that change is not reflected on the world political map.” This seemingly nonsensical statement makes sense with the addition two Latin terms: “On September 20, 2023, the de facto world political map underwent a significant change, but that change is not reflected on the de jure world political map.” The de facto map, which shows actual power on the ground, was transformed by the defeat of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and its impending annexation by Azerbaijan. But as Nagorno-Karabakh was already part of Azerbaijan according to diplomatic convention, the official de jure map of the region registered no change.

From its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 until late September of this year, Azerbaijan did not exercise power over its full internationally recognized territory. Its southwestern corner was instead under the power of the self-declared and unrecognized state called Artsakh, better known as Nagorno-Karabakh. This Armenian-populated region functioned as a client state of the Republic of Armenia, if not as an appendage of it. In 2020, Azerbaijan defeated Armenia/Artsakh in a brief war and took control of most of the disputed territory, leaving only the core region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was connected to Armenia proper by the narrow Lachin Corridor, patrolled by Russian troops. Earlier this year, Azerbaijan cut-off access to the corridor, putting great pressure on Artsakh. On September 19-20, Azerbaijan’s military overran the entire area, after which Artsakh’s leadership announced that their statelet would be dissolved on January 1, 2024. As a result, Azerbaijan will for the first time control its entire territorial extent as recognized by international convention. But the de jure and de facto maps remain out of alignment elsewhere in the Caucasus, as two official parts of Georgia are still under the control of two Russian client states, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

An extended New York Time headline of September 29 nicely captures the current geopolitical situation of the losing country: “Armenia: Cast Adrift in a Tough Neighborhood. While the Caucasus nation might want to reduce its reliance on Russia for a more reliable ally, Western nations have offered moral support but little else.” After independence in 1991, Armenia turned to Russia for military support, hosting a Russian military base and joining the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (along with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan). But Russia was of little help in its 2020 war with Azerbaijan, in which Azerbaijan’s Turkish- and Israeli-made drones outperformed Armenia’s Russian-made armaments. Armenia then began edging away from Russia and toward the West, a process that accelerated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Just before Azerbaijan conquered the rest of Artsakh in late September 2023, U.S. military personnel were helping train Armenian troops in Armenia. But the U.S. offered nothing beyond vaguely smoothing words after Azerbaijan’s military assault. As reported by the New York Times, the United States “has so far resisted placing sanctions on Azerbaijan for a military assault that the State Department previously said it would not countenance.”

The lack of support for Armenia by the United States is not surprising. The U.S., like most countries in most circumstance, stands in favor of the official de jure world political map, and is thus reluctant to acknowledge any alternative arrangements. (Although there are certainly exceptions, such as Washington’s recognition of the independence of Kosovo, which seceded unilaterally from Serbia and is thus unrecognized by the United Nations.) Brute geopolitical realities also favor Azerbaijan, as it is much more populous and economically developed than Armenia. As a relatively secular Shia Muslim nation, moreover, Azerbaijan is also a useful counterweight against Iran (more Azeri speakers live in Iran than in Azerbaijan).

Immediately after the fall of Artsakh, ethnic Armenians began streaming out of the region, seeking refuge in Armenia proper. It is expected that by the end of the year there will be few if any Armenians left in the region. Azerbaijan claims that Armenians could remain in place as Azerbaijani citizens. Armenians, however, point to Azerbaijan’s threats and purported atrocities, arguing, with some international support, that genocide would be the more likely outcome if they were to remain. Azerbaijani apologists, for their part, point to the fact that many Azeris once lived in what is now Armenia, but were themselves victims of Armenian-led expulsions (see the map below). It also true that ethnic Kurds, who were formerly the dominant population between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh proper, fled or were expelled after the expansion of Armenian power following the fall of the Soviet Union (see the map below). (Other Kurdish populations from both Armenia and Azerbaijan had been deported by Soviet authorities to Kazakhstan in 1937.)

From a world historical perspective, Azerbaijan’s conquest of Artsakh and the subsequent removal of the Armenian population from the region represents one more chapter in the long history of the diminution of the Armenian territorial sphere. As the paired maps below show, Armenians once constituted either a majority or a large minority over a broad zone extending across what is now eastern Turkey and beyond (unfortunately, the Vivid Map posted here has no key). Ottoman expulsions of Armenians before and especially during World War I, recognized by most historians as an episode of genocide, vastly reduced the extent of Armenian populated land. After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Armenian communities were either expelled from or voluntarily left many former Soviet lands. With the downfall of Artsakh, the contiguous zone of Armenian-populated territory is now reduced to the small rump state of Armenia.

Understandably, many Armenian-Americans have been enraged about the lack of U.S. action on this issue. As reported in the Guardian:

Everything that is happening today is utterly predictable, and much of it could be avoided with more forceful American action,” Paul Krekorian, the first Armenian American president of the Los Angeles city council, told the Guardian.

It’s a catastrophic situation. Genocide is happening before our very eyes,” Krekorian said. “And my country is doing essentially nothing.” Memories of the 1915 Armenian genocide, when 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians died under the Ottoman Turkish empire, remain strong in the community and many of the signs held outside the Ronald Reagan library referenced it and what the protesters saw as its echoes.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, few American media outlets have done much substantive reporting on this issue. At one time, something like this would have been a major news story. Over the past half-century, however, the U.S. new media have become increasingly insular, tightly focused on American politics, society, and culture, and hence little concerned with most events occurring outside the country. Economic globalization has oddly coincided with journalistic deglobalization.

Who Are the Gagauz, Where Is Gagauzia, and Why Are They in the News?

Article-Grid, Autonomous Zones, Regionalism, Self-Declared States / By

The “Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia,” located in southern Moldova, rarely makes the news. On September 25, 2023, however, the New York Times ran a full-page article on the region under the vague title “Fugitive Oligarch Gaines Surprise Foothold in Moldova.* The article describes Gagauzia as an “enclave” within Moldova. That is not technically correct, as a geopolitical enclave is part of one country that is surrounded by the territory of another, whereas Gagauzia is merely an autonomous region of Moldova. Fear of losing that autonomy lies behind the ethnic tensions that have given this obscure region international attention.

The New York Times article focuses on the shady activities of Ilan Shor, a disgraced financier who was “convicted in 2017 for his role in ransacking Moldova’s banking system.” In the summer of 2023, a follower of Shor, Evghenia Guțul (Yevgenia Gutsal), was elected governor of Gagauzia, allowing Shor to gain considerable power in the autonomous unit. This victory was internationally significant because Guțul and Shor support Russia and oppose the E.U. The United States accused Shor in 2022 “of working with ‘Moscow-based entities’ to undermine Moldova’s efforts to join the European Union and engaging in ‘persistent malign influence campaigns on behalf of Russia.’” (Note: direct quotes in this paragraph are from the Times article.)

The description of Gagauzia in the New York Times’ article is minimal. It notes only that Gagauzia is a “Russian-speaking region wary of the largely Romanian-speaking authorities in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital,” and that “the enclave, with around 140,000 people, mostly members of the small Turkic community of Orthodox Christians, remained out of step with the rest of the country.” Although largely accurate, this depiction is not adequate for understanding the tensions in the region. One might wonder, for example, how Gagauzia can be “Russian-speaking” when its majority ethnic group, the Gagauz, are “Turkic,” indicating that they speak a Turkic language. Yet both assertions are essentially true. The Gagauz tongue, the territory’s official language, is indeed in the Turkic language family, but its use is rapidly declining, especially in cities and towns, in favor of Russian, long used as Moldova’s main language of inter-ethnic communication. While the Gagauz are turning to Russian, they are also rejecting Romanian (or “Moldovan,” as it is often locally called), their county’s official** language. Such attitudes do not augur well for Moldova’s national future.

The origin of the Gagauz people is obscure, owing in part to their combination of speaking a Turkic language and following Eastern Orthodox Christianity. As the Wikipedia article on the Gagauz notes, “In the beginning of the 20th century, a Bulgarian historian counted 19 different theories about their origin. A few decades later the Gagauz ethnologist M. N. Guboglo increased the number to 21.” The most intriguing, if highly unlikely, theory is that they are descendants of the original Balkan Bulgarians, who were a Turkic-speaking people who conquered the area now known as Bulgaria beginning in the late seventh century. The Bulgars subsequently adopted the Slavic language widely spoken in their new kingdom, which became known as Bulgarian, and also converted to Christianity under influence from the neighboring Byzantine (East Roman) Empire.

Whatever their origins, the Gagauz stress their affinity with the Bulgarians. In early times they generally called themselves “Hasli Bulgars” (True Bulgarians) or “Eski Bulgars” (Old Bulgarians), Under Russian Empire, they were usually called “Turkic-speaking Bulgars,” as the term “Gagauz” was at the time often considered offensive. Most Gagauz today live near Bulgarian-speaking settlements in southern Moldova and the adjacent Ukrainian region of Budjak, as can be seen on the map posted below. (Since I cobbled this map together from separate and questionable language maps of Moldova and Ukraine, its accuracy is probably not very high.)

It might be surprising that so many Bulgarians live in southern Moldova and southwestern Ukraine, considering how far this area is from Bulgaria. Before population exchanges in the early twentieth century, however, many Bulgarians lived in the intermediate coastal region of Romania, thus forming a nearly continuous swath of settlement in an admittedly highly mixed area (see the first map below). The language map of the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century, posted below as well, is also revealing. Bessarabia, which included what is now Moldova, the Budjak region, and a small section of northwestern Ukraine, was highly ethnically mixed. Note the sizable German-speaking area and the prominent positions of Jews in the towns and cities (visible in the pie charts). Today there are probably fewer than 20,000 Jews in Moldova, and its German population is negligible.

The Gagauz in Moldova identify with Bulgarians and Russians rather than with ethnic Moldovans in part because they are concerned about cultural domination by Romanian-speaking people. When the Soviet Union began to fracture in 1990, Gagauz leaders declared the formation of a Gagauz Republic, which gained de facto independence when the Soviet system collapsed in the following year. A similar situation emerged in eastern Moldova, where the heavily Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking region called Transnistria also separated from the rest of the country. Unlike Transnistria, however, Gagazia was peacefully reunited with Moldova in 1995 after its people accepted limited self-rule within their own spatially reduced Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia (see the map below). Importantly, the Gagauz were promised that if Moldova were ever to unite with Romania, they would be able to opt out of the union. Unification with Romania, however, has little support in Moldova; in the country’s most recent parliamentary election, the pro-unification party AUR (Alliance for the Union of Romanians) received less than one half of one percent of the vote. In Romania, in contrast, AUR got over nine percent of the vote in the most recent election, finishing in fourth place.

But if union with Romania is unlikely, the Moldovan government has still been emphasizing the use of the Romanian (“Moldovan”) language and deemphasizing that of Russian. In protest, as noted in a Balkan Insight article, “Gagauzia adopted a regional education code that implied a greater use of the Gagauz language in school, as well as a more detailed study of Gagauz history and culture” in 2016. The Moldovan government, however, declared this new policy to be “unconstitutional and provocative.” Today, a more immediate concern of the Gagauz is Moldova’s quest to join the European Union (official candidacy was gained June 2022). If that were to happen, Gagauzia could lose its autonomous status. To guard against this possibility, Gagauz leaders have been seeking support from Moscow, a dangerous gambit indeed.

Reports on feelings of national identity in Gagauzia are mixed. One recent article cites a Gagauz informant as stating that “anyone who lives in our autonomy feels like a citizen of Moldova, because the Gagauz have no other homeland. For example, Bulgarians can go to Bulgaria, Greeks to Greece, Russians to Russia… But the Gagauz have no other homeland.” The same person also stated, however, that few Gagauz students seek higher education elsewhere in Moldova, preferring to study instead in the break-away statelet of Transnisria, where Russian is the main language of instruction. Other sources, moreover, claim that anti-Moldovan sentiments are so pronounced that most Gagauz do not even want to learn Romanian, their “national” language. In response, many Moldovan observers fear that the autonomous territory is planning outright secession, in concert with Russia.

In the Ukrainian region of Budjak, Bulgarian and Gagauz speakers have generally supported Russia-friendly candidates over their Ukrainian nationalist rivals. As can be seen on the paired maps posted below, in the first round of the 2019 election, Ukrainian-speaking areas in Budjak generally supported Volodymyr Zelensky, whereas the Bulgarian- and Gagauz-speaking areas supported Yuriy Boyko. Boyko’s party, Opposition Platform – For Life, has been banned by the Ukrainian government for its pro-Russian leanings. But as the Wikipedia article on Boyko notes, after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine he reversed most of his pro-Russian stances and now supports Ukraine’s proposed ascension to the European Union. Not surprisingly, the political environment of Ukraine changed much more dramatically than that of Moldova after the 2022 invasion.

* That is the title in the print edition. In the on-line edition it is “Cash, Mules and Paid Protests: How a Fraudster Seized an Ethnic Enclave”

** Moldova also recognizes Belarusian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, German, Hebrew, Polish, Romani, Russian, and Ukrainian as minority languages

Non-Metropolitan Patterns of Population Change in the United States, 2020-2022

Article-Grid, North America, Population Geography / By

Earlier this year Axios published a revealing map of population change in all counties in the United States from 2020 through 2022. This map, unlike the ones that I made and posted earlier this week, allows one to assess population change in non-metropolitan as well as metropolitan areas. As can be easily seen for the United States as a whole, rapid growth was concentrated in three areas: western and central Florida; the suburban and exurban fringes ringing the largest cities of Texas; and a western belt encompassing Utah, Idaho, and western Montana. Other interesting patterns can also be discerned. To clarify them, the rest of this post will examine state-and regional-level map-details extracted from this national map.  

Let us begin with Appalachia. Several recent articles (for example, this one by Aaron M. Renn) have noted that southern Appalachia is doing much better than northern Appalachia on almost every metric. It is therefore no surprise that most counties in southern Appalachia grew during this period while many if not most in the north shrank (that is, if “north” is defined as all areas north of the northern borders of North Carolina and Tennessee).

Appalachia is often placed in the same cultural and socio-economic category as the Ozark Plateau, located mostly in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. Both areas are characterized by steep terrain, heavy forests, and a backwoods folk culture that is both widely denigrated and romanticized. In terms of recent population change, the Ozark Plateau clearly groups with southern Appalachia. But as can be seen on the paired maps below, most counties in this region lost population, or remained relatively static, during the 2010 to 2020 period. The only substantial growth then was in its two metropolitan areas, Springfield in southwestern Missouri and Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers (home of Walmart and several other major corporations) in northwestern Arkansas. When the COVID pandemic hit, however, people began to relocate to the region’s rural counties. I was intrigued by the very rapid growth shown for Wright County. A quick Internet search, however, returned almost nothing other than a single highly misleading post from World Population Review, which claimed that the county’s population dropped during this period. But as the table and graph posted below indicate, this information was improperly extrapolated from a tiny snippet of information from an earlier period. I find it amusing that this reputable website claims that Wright County lost exactly 63 people every single year between 2011 and 2023! Such are the dangers of automated demographic interpretation.

Recent population growth in the Ozark Plateau is reflected in the expansion experienced in other lightly populated, scenic parts of the country. Most of Maine, the northern lower peninsula of Michigan, and northern Wisconsin also saw rural population growth in this period. An interesting place to examine this phenomenon is in the Dakotas. As the maps posted below show, most counties in far western South Dakota saw major population gains from 2020 to 2022 whereas most of those of western North Dakota saw significant declines. This pattern is easily explained. Western North Dakota experienced massive growth from 2010 to 2020 due to the oil boom in the Bakken Formation. That boom came and went (although it may return), and as a result the region’s population dropped sharply after the 2020 census. Western South Dakota, in contrast, contains the Black Hills, a scenic region with high amenity values. It is therefore no surprised that it saw a boom during the COVID period. It is important to note, however, that many counties in the western Dakotas have so few people that the gain or loss of a small number can make a dramatic difference on this map.

Differences between states are also apparent on the national COVID-era population-change map. Consider, for example, the neighboring states of Illinois and Indiana. Although Indiana and Illinois are politically very distinct, their non-metropolitan counties are quite similar. But recent population change at the county level differs greatly across the state border. Only five counties in Indiana had more than a one-percent population loss during this period, whereas only three counties in Illinois had more than a one-percent gain. The financial woes of Illinois are probably a significant factor here.

Idaho and western & south-central Montana show stark difference between the 2010-2020 and the 2020-2022 population-change maps. In the earlier period, quite a few primarily rural counties lost population. In the latter, only tiny Wheatland County, Montana (population 2,069 in 2020) lost more than one percent of its residents. From 2020 to 2022, many counties in this region, both metropolitan and rural, saw population gains of more than five percent.

California makes an interesting contrast with Idaho and Montana. Population loss from 2020 to 2022 was concentrated in the affluent coastal region, with San Francisco County exhibiting a drop of 7 percent, the largest in the country. But quite a few low-population, peripheral counties also experienced big drops, with Lassen declining by more than five percent. Intriguingly, some of these scenic counties with high outdoor-amenity values had experienced demographic booms in the final decades of the twentieth century. But as can be seen in the tables posted with the map below, this growth had essentially come to an end by 2010. Both Tuolumne and Mono counties, adjacent to Yosemite National Park, lost more than one percent of their population between 2020 and 2022. Evidently, state boundaries matter considerably in relocation decisions, and California is no longer a very attractive state.

 

 

 

 

Striking Patterns of Population Change in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 2020-2022

Article-Grid, North America, Population Geography / By

The 2020 to 2022 COVID period saw major population changes in the metropolitan areas of the United States, with some experiencing rapid gains and others rapid losses. Wildwood-The Villages, Florida, for example, saw a staggering 11.75 percent population increase, whereas Lake Charles, Louisiana witnessed a sobering decline of 6.01 percent. Mapping these changes reveals some interesting patterns.

The first map, showing population change in major metropolitan areas (defined here as those with more than 1.5 million people in 2002) exhibits clear regional differences. A stark north/south divide is evident in the region east of the Mississippi River. Here, every major metro area in the South saw population gains, some significant. So too did three out four in the lower Midwest (Columbus, OH, Cincinnati, OH, and Indianapolis, IN), although by smaller margins. By contrast, every major metropolitan area in the Northeast and upper Midwest lost population. In the western two-thirds of the country, population declines were restricted to the Pacific Coastal region. Here every major metropolitan area except Seattle saw a decline. Texas, in contrast, is notable for its rapid metropolitan expansion, with Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio all registering major gains in this period.

Somewhat different patterns are seen on the map of secondary metropolitan areas, defined here as those with populations between 700,000 and 1.5 million in 2022. As can be seen, fewer of these smaller metro areas lost population, indicating a shift from larger to smaller cities. Intriguingly, most of those that did decline are in or near the Mississippi River and the eastern Great Lakes, the main transportation corridor of the central part of the U.S. before the coming of railroads. New Orleans (official, the New Orleans–Metairie metropolitan statistical area) saw a drop of over 3.5 percent. I was surprised to see that New Orleans is no longer populous enough to qualify for the higher categories on this map, as its population has apparently dropped below one million. A major statistical discrepancy, however, complicates this analysis. According to the Wikipedia table that I used to make this map, New Orleans–Metairie had a population of only 972,913 in 2022, having declined from 1,007,275 in 2020. The Wikipedia article on the New Orleans–Metairie metro area, however, gives it a population of 1,271,845 in 2020. But no matter how one looks at it, New Orleans has hemorrhaged population, with the city itself dropping from 627,525 residents in 1960 to 383,997 in 2020.

The secondary metro areas that saw population growth in this period also exhibit some interesting patterns. Those in the Atlantic Northeast all saw minor population gains, presumably due to people fleeing the region’s larger and more expensive major metro areas. Much more rapid expansion, however, was experienced in the secondary metro areas of the southeast, particularly in Florida and the Carolinas. Secondary metro areas in the interior West also saw substantial growth.

Even more distinct patterns are visible on the map showing the fastest growing and fastest shrinking metro areas of all sizes during this period. (Many official metropolitan areas, it is important to note, are not large; Eagle Pass, TX, for example, has fewer than 60,000 inhabitants.) As can easily be seen, most of the fastest growing metro areas are in the southeastern coastal region, stretching from the Gulf Coast of Alabama through the Atlantic Coast of the Carolinas. Florida really stands out on this map. Several smaller metro areas in the non-coastal West also saw extremely rapid growth. St. George UT, for example, went from 180,279 to 197,680 inhabitants, a gain of almost 10 percent. After having witnessed the boomtown atmosphere of Bozeman MT, which does not even qualify for this map with a growth rate of just under 5%, I have a difficult time understanding how the infrastructure of Saint George could keep up with such rapid population expansion.

In contrast, three states stand out for the rapid population decline of many of their metropolitan areas: California, Louisiana, and West Virginia (metro area #16 on this map is Weirton–Steubenville, located in both West Virginia and Ohio). Although metropolitan growth from 2020 to 2022 was concentrated in Republican-voting states, Louisiana and West Virginia form clear exceptions.

The final map shows population loss-and-gain patterns in California’s metropolitan areas during the same 2020-2022 period. Here again the pattern is clear: all coastal metro areas,  which have equable climates but are very expensive, lost population, whereas most less-expensive metro areas in the Central Valley, a region noted for its scorching summers, gained population, as did the similarly toasty San Bernardino-Riverside metro area in Southern California, the so-called Inland Empire. The college town of Chico in Butte County in the northern Central Valley (or Sacramento Valley) however, saw a significant population drop.

Tomorrow’s post will examine the geography of population change in this period in rural counties.

Patterns of Income Inequality in Major U.S. Metropolitan Areas and Population Change, 2020-2022

Article-Grid, Economic Geography / By

The four U.S. states with the highest levels of income inequality are, in order, New York, Connecticut, Louisiana, and Mississippi. When mapped at the county level, however, New York and Connecticut appear to have lower levels of inequality than Louisiana and Mississippi. The seeming discrepancy is easily explained by population density. In New York and Connecticut, high GINI coefficients are found in densely populated counties that are part of the greater New York metropolitan area; counties with smaller cities, in contrast, tend to have average levels of income inequality, whereas most rural counties in these states have relatively low levels. (Unfortunately, the scale of resolution on the maps that I have used does not adequately reveal this phenomenon; most of New York City, for example, is obscured by the heavy black line that is used for state boundaries.) In Louisiana and especially Mississippi, in contrast, many rural and semi-rural counties are characterized by pronounced income inequality.

But how do the high levels of income inequality in the New York area compare to those found in and around other major U.C. cities? To address this question, I extracted details from the county-level GINI map of the United States to show the situation in the vicinity of 16 major metro areas found across the country. As can be seen, in each case the central county or counties, those with the highest population densities, have higher levels of income inequality than the more suburban and peripheral counties.

Such comparisons are made difficult, however, by the incommensurable nature of the units. In some cases, inner counties are extremely small; San Francisco County, for example, is coterminous with the city of San Francisco, whereas New York City is itself divided into multiple counties. In contrast, Phoenix tends to vanish in the vast expanse of Maricopa County.

But even with these limitations in mind, there are still some intriguing lessons to be drawn from these maps. At the high end of the inequality spectrum is Miami, followed by New York and San Francisco, where almost all counties in the greater metro areas have average to high GINI coeffiecient. Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, and Washington DC/Baltimore, in contrast, are surrounded by suburban and peripheral counties with relatively low levels of income inequality. I was surprised to see this pattern in the Washington D.C. area, which is by some measures the wealthiest part of the country. As can be seen on the small map, Baltimore and the District of Columbia are, not surprisingly, characterized by high inequality, as is, more surprisingly, rural Talbot County in eastern Maryland. Affluent Montgomery County, in contrast, falls in the middle category.

Many of the country’s major metropolitan areas saw population decreases between 2020 and 2022. Such declines tended to be steepest in areas of pronounced inequality. The New York metro area, for example, lost 2.6 percent of its population and the San Francisco metro area 3.6 percent, the steepest drop in the country. The less unequal Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, and Phoenix metro areas, in contrast, all gained population. But exceptions are certainly found. The Washington, D.C. area, with its relatively income-equal suburban counties, lost population, although just barely (0.21 percent), while the highly unequal Miami metro area gained population, although again just barely (0.02 percent).

Air-Conditioning Needs and Cartographic Failure at the Washington Post

Article-Grid, Environmental Geography, Northern California / By

The Washington Post recently ran an article entitled “Addicted to Cool: How the Dream of Air Conditioning Turned into the Dark Future of Climate Change,” which features three maps of “Summer Days Requiring AC” in the U.S. at different periods of time (1981-200, 2001-2002, and 2060). As expected, the region needing air conditioning is projected to expand. Determining how many days actually “require” air conditioning is, however, an impossible task, as different people vary significantly in their cooling desires and demands, while housing design and shade considerations make big differences as well. Understandably bypassing such complexities, the newspaper used the heat index, a measurement of temperature and humidity, as a proxy. Unsurprisingly, their maps show that a large area of the country already needs summer air conditioning, and that in the decades to come the need for cooling will geographically expand.

The maps included in the article, however, are not impressive, to put it mildly. Their problems are particularly severe regarding California. As can be seen on the map detail of Southern California posted below, the Post’s mapping accurately shows the eastern deserts and the inland western regions as needing air conditioning on most if not all summer days. It also accurately depicts the highest elevation areas as rarely requiring it. But the same map also portrays the coastal zone as AC-dependent. This is not true. Downtown San Diego, for example, has an average July high temperature of 75 degrees Fahrenheit and an average July low of 66 (over the 1991-2020 period). Further north, in Rancho Palos Verdes, similar conditions prevail. According to Weather Spark, “The hottest month of the year in Rancho Palos Verdes is August, with an average high of 76°F and low of 64°F.” The same site also notes that “Over the course of the year, the temperature typically varies from 51°F to 76°F and is rarely below 46°F or above 84°F.” This is climate that very rarely calls for cooling.

The map is equally inaccurate in its depiction of Northern California. As can be seen on the map detail posted below, it does capture the cool summers characteristic of the coastal regions in and around San Francisco and Monterey bays. It completely misses the fact, however, that other coastal regions also have mild summers. The average July high and low temperatures in Point Arena, Santa Cruz, and Carmel are, respectively 65 and 50 degrees F.; 74 and 54; and 70 and 53 (all based on the climatological data found in the Wikipedia articles on these towns). In Point Arena, one is more likely to want heating than air conditioning in June and July, yet the map indicates that cooling is needed on most summer days.

Other odd features mar the map. As can be seen, the city of San Francisco is mislocated in the bay and on its eastern shore.  The national map also features a faint white line that traces part of San Francisco Bay and would appear to indicate the actual coastline, at least in some areas.  Was one map imprecisely overlaid on another?

Although these problems are serious enough, it is the map of projected air-conditioning needs in the year 2060 that truly fails. This can be seen easily on the paired maps showing current and projected AC requirements in California. Here much of the currently cool Big Sur coastal zone is projected to have much reduced air-conditioning needs by 2060. This region of projected cooling is bizarrely shown as extending over the Santa Lucia Range into the southern Salinas Valley, an area that now experiences warm summers (King City has an average July high of 85 degrees F.). Similarly, the currently warm inland area north of Santa Barbara is shown as being expected to have much cooler summers in 2060 than it does today, while with the rest of Southern California is projected to warm.

One can only wonder whether the cartographers in question actually examined these maps before publication, or, if they did, whether they have much of an understanding of the geography of climate. It often seems that journalists use maps as mere ornaments or, alternatively, to have the appearance of spatial precision without the substance. The maps in this article do little more than make the trite point that “more of us will need air conditioning as the climate warms.” Readers deserve better, especially from a once-great paper that is owned by the third richest person in the world.

Geographical Patterns of Income Inequality in the U.S. at the State and County Levels

Article-Grid, Economic Geography, North America / By

I have long been intrigued by the geography of income inequality in the United States. As maps of the GINI coefficient show, income inequality is highest some of the country’s richest states (New York, Connecticut) and in some of its poorest (Louisiana, Mississippi). Similarly, some of the country’s most Democratic-voting states and some of its most Republican-voting ones are characterized by pronounced income inequality. Relatively low levels of income inequality are concentrated in an area that might crudely be described as the center-north-west, with four contiguous states occupying the lowest category on the map (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota). Low population density characterizes states with low income inequality. All of the states in the bottom two categories on this map except Hawaii have a lower-than-average population density. Politically, these states show the same mixed pattern that characterized the most economically polarized states. Although all the states in the lowest GINI category are bright red on electoral maps, two that fall into the next lowest category (Vermont, Hawaii) are bright blue.

A county-level GINI map clarifies the geography of U.S. income inequality and reveals some interesting patterns (unfortunately, the best map that I could find on this topic is somewhat dated). As can be seen, the elevated levels of income inequality found in northeastern states is largely an urban phenomenon. In the southeast, in contrast, some counties with high GINI coefficients are metropolitan (in southeastern Florida, for example), but others are markedly rural. In Western and Great Plains states characterized by relatively low income inequality, quite a few of their rural counties have high GINI scores.

In North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, some rural counties characterized by high income inequality also have a high percentage of Native American residents. To illustrate this correlation, I have placed a GINI map of the Dakotas next to one of indigenous population percentage. But there are a few striking exceptions to this pattern, two of which are noted on the map. As can be seen, Divide County, North Dakota has a small Native American population and a high GINI coefficient. Pete Morris’s agricultural explanation of income inequality, outlined in his comment on yesterday’s post, is probably relevant here as well. In contrast, Buffalo County, South Dakota has a large Native American population and a low GINI coefficient. Both of these counties have very small populations. Buffalo County is noteworthy for having the least populous county seat in the United States (Gann Valley, with a population of 14).

In the south-central region of the country, most counties with high levels of income inequality have large black populations. But again, interesting exceptions can be found. As can be seen, Jefferson County, Arkansas has a high percentage of Black residents and a mid-level GINI ranking. In contrast, Marshall County, Alabama has a very low percentage of Black residents and a high level of inequality. Jefferson County, intriguingly, is known for its concentration of “correctional facilities,” mostly located in and around Pine Bluff. Marshall County, Alabama, in contrast, is part of the Huntsville-Decatur Combined Statistical Area, a region noted for its many well-paid technical workers, owing largely to that presence of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the United States Army Aviation and Missile Command, and the FBI ‘s Operational Support Headquarters. Marshall’s largest city, Albertville, is mostly noted, however, as the home of the fire-hydrant-manufacturing Mueller Company. As noted by the Wikipedia article on the city, “Albertville holds the title of “Fire Hydrant Capital of the World.” To commemorate the one millionth fire hydrant, a chrome fire hydrant was placed outside the Albertville Chamber of Commerce.”

The next GeoCurrents post will examine the geography of income  inequality in the country’s largest metropolitan areas.