Chiloé is a charming island, but the traveler must be prepared to face a few frustrations. Towns like Ancud and Castro are very crowded. The traffic is congested and it’s hard to find a place to park. Even the sidewalks are crowded with people. The roads are narrow and the houses are packed into a small space.
Chiloe is also a relatively poor province by Chilean standards, and I suspect that helps explain why it is more crowded than other parts of Chile.
When I was young, lots of educated people linked poverty with “overpopulation”. That wasn’t actually true, but I can sort of understand how people reached that conclusion. Poor places often seem quite crowded.
But crowding is not the same thing as high population density. Orange County is only about 1/4th the size of Chiloé, but has 20 times the population (3.2 million vs. 160,000.) That makes it 80 times denser. And yet Orange County feels quite spacious. It has wide roads where the traffic flows easily, and there are plenty of places to park. The sidewalks are not crowded. You don’t have to push past people while shopping.
You might argue that Orange County is urban and Chiloé is a mix of crowded towns and open countryside, so I’m comparing apples and oranges. But Connecticut is also a mix of towns and countryside, is only 50% larger than Chiloé, and yet has more than 20 times more people. It also feels far less crowded.
So what’s going on here? Why do poor places that have low population density seem so crowded? I’m not sure, but here are some possibilities:
1. When traveling in Austria last fall, I noticed that things worked extremely smoothly despite high population density. That’s partly due to two factors—more infrastructure and better designed infrastructure. Bad infrastructure makes things seem more crowded.
2. Poor people may choose to consume less land (to save money). They may choose to live in crowded conditions, even in smaller towns, in order to be able to consume more of other goods.
3. Poor people may lack many modern conveniences, and derive a greater share of their utility from social interaction. They may find crowded conditions to be less annoying than does a cold, anti-social North American like me. (Even worse, of Nordic and British descent!)
4. The poor may rely more heavily on walking, in which case they may prefer a dense environment.
Other ideas?
And it’s not just Chiloé. Everywhere I’ve traveled, I see crowded conditions in poorer towns. People associate China with crowded big cities like Shanghai, but even the smaller towns in China are quite crowded.
PS. To anticipate one criticism, it is tourist season. But I believe the phenomenon I describe is fairly general. Yesterday, I exited a parking area at a tourist site by slowly backing our rental car for several hundred meters between a row of cars on one side and a barbed wire fence on the other. There wasn’t even room to turn around. That doesn’t happen at US tourist areas. And yet this was in the wilderness, where there is plenty of open land.
READER COMMENTS
TMC
Feb 24 2023 at 12:11pm
Infrastructure is expensive, especially on an island. It’ll be interesting if you visit again after a few years of having the bridge open. I was in Costa Rica (20% poorer) last year in a semi-tourist area and while the housing seemed crowded, the streets and shops did not. Everything was well spaced. Not too different than NYC which I also find to be uncomfortably crowded.
Henri Hein
Feb 24 2023 at 3:48pm
I have noticed a similar thing in my travels, but it’s oddly selective. For instance, you can be walking down a densely crowded street, then step into a store or mini-mall or side-street that is completely empty.
I surmise lack of good transportation options is part of the explanation. In America, it’s incredibly convenient to get to most places you want to go, even without planning or knowing the conditions. The opportunity cost if you change your mind en route is not even that great. People respond to traffic, a full parking lot, or nowadays, red lines on the Google traffic map. That leads to some flattening of destination choices. If your only option is a smelly bus that may or may not run on time, you will want to plan ahead and limit your trips. That leads to more of a zipf distribution for destinations.
Scott Sumner
Feb 24 2023 at 5:30pm
Good points.
BC
Feb 24 2023 at 7:21pm
Are these areas characterized by dense, crowded developments surrounded by undeveloped or farm land? That would explain why an area could both feel crowded and yet not have high average population density. The population density is non-uniform.
“Spreading out” can carry a lot of costs: infrastructure like utilities and roads need to be extended and transportation costs rise (cars instead of walking and mass transit). So, poor people may find it more affordable to rent a small apartment in a crowded neighborhood than to build a house on unoccupied but far away land. They may not be rich enough to afford urban sprawl.
ssumner
Feb 26 2023 at 8:16am
“Are these areas characterized by dense, crowded developments surrounded by undeveloped or farm land?”
Yes.
Arqiduka
Feb 25 2023 at 1:45am
Am intimately familiar with the difference in “crowdedness” between richer and poorer countries, and I lay the blame squarely at the feet of poor infrastructure. In a developing country nearly no one can afford to live 30k from the city they work in and still commute to work daily. This is compounded by poor utilities, as its far cheaper to connect a few high-rises to the water supply and other systems than a spread-out area.
Disagree that poorer places only “feel” crowded without actually being more densely populated, as the counterexamples you bring are biased by a nearly arbitrary choice of area to measure. If you pick two regions with similar populations, no matter what subset of that population you pick, they will always live in a smaller area in the poorer region than in the richer region. There’s probably some metric that would capture this over simple density (distance between two random citizens’ addresses) but I cannot produce it.
Brandon Berg
Feb 25 2023 at 4:27am
One hypothesis that comes to mind is that in wealthy areas people tend to have better homes. They’re larger, air conditioned, have better amenities, etc. So people spend more time at home.
Phil H
Feb 27 2023 at 12:04pm
Yeah, this was what leaped to my mind. One of the behaviours that contributes heavily to the crowded feeling is people occupying public space, particularly without an obvious purpose. That means hawkers and people just chilling in the street. Those behaviours happen much more in poorer places.
Dylan
Feb 25 2023 at 6:50am
Interesting observation, but I’m not sure how generalizable it is. Particularly when you look at intercountry comparisons. You’ve traveled in China far more than I have, but my impression was that rich Hong Kong felt far more crowded than any other city I visited in southern China, like Xiamen. In India, any city is going to feel very crowded, which is probably due to the chaotic nature of city life, but the country side is much poorer and doesn’t feel crowded at all (an aside, but most westerners I know attribute the uncomfortableness they feel in India to seeing all the poverty on the streets, yet feel much more comfortable in the poorer countryside)
And maybe the U.S. is just too rich overall to show these characteristics, but Orange County certainly feels way more crowded than anywhere in Appalachia (to me it feels more crowded than most places in Brooklyn, but I think the things you attribute with a feeling of spaciousness, like wide streets with lots of lanes, give me the opposite feeling)
ssumner
Feb 26 2023 at 8:19am
Hong Kong is a special case due to land use policies. I’d say that Singapore and Tokyo feel less crowded than Chinese cities.
bb
Feb 25 2023 at 12:37pm
Probably a small factor, but poor people may be more dependent on being physically adjacent to opportunities. Not just economic opportunities, but social opportunities too. Notice how college campuses seem less crowded now? Back in my day you went out to the quad after class to find out where you were going that night, or even the next night if it was Friday. That’s not a thing anymore. And poor people are probably much more reliant on social networks that can only be cultivated by being physically present.
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