And Prince Rupert is just a better harbour in general, kind of a shame it got side lined so hard IOTL.
Cities that could have been much larger
- Thread starter Centralen
- Start date
-
- Tags
- cities urban urban development
- Status
The whole A-H coastline would be, with 100+ million people (today sans war) beach side property would be very popular. You can reasonable have maybe 10 or so million+ cities from Dubrovnik up to Monfalcone with Triest and Fiume as the biggest and most industrialized ones.
How are you going to fit 1 million people around prince rupert? It's nothing but fjords, i could see it becoming as large as Bergen at most, 300-400k people.
The erosion of jobs as a function of the decline of steel led in no small part to the conditions that allowed riots to happen. To be sure, the MLK assassination lit the fuse--but if unemployment is low and economic conditions are better, there are fewer incentives to riot.
kernals12
Banned
Boiling race riots down to a lack of jobs is extremely myopic and not backed by any evidence. The national unemployment rate during the long hot summer of 1967 was 3 and a half percent.
Southampton and Portsmouth (they can easily grow into each other as they slowly are now) in Britain had they somehow beaten Bristol and Liverpool to the mark in the 18th century as the prime port towns.
What was the African-American unemployment rate? Historically, that's always been significantly higher than the overall unemployment rate.
kernals12
Banned
You just showed why it's not a plausible explanation, but to answer your question; The BLS only started breaking down the unemployment rate by race in 1972, but the ratio of the black unemployment rate to the overall unemployment rate has long been very stable at about 1.8, meaning that it would've been 6.3% in 1967. That's much lower than it's been at other times. It was 20% in 1982.
While I agree with your other points (and brought the differential up merely as a reminder that national average unemployment rates are not necessarily very useful for discussing particular demographics or localities), I'm curious as to how you got this from my post. I only wrote two sentences, one of them was a question and the other was a statement you didn't even dispute...
That, having gone to university in Birmingham, and talked with a few people involved with politics in the city.
Assuming a larger Birmingham population and possibly West Midlands one yeah you'd probably see the city growing and absorbing some surrounding land. How much depends on how greater a population figure compared to nowadays it has of course.
Ages back when I was thinking about a timeline I had a larger and more successful Birmingham and the West Midlands area clocking at around the 4 million mark, with its success having taken some of the pressure off the Greater London area with it having a population of just over 8 million. Of course it wouldn't be quite that direct a correlation but it was all very much back of an envelope. For that big a change you'd probably need a stronger West Midlands County Council – which would be tricky as it apparently wasn't exactly popular or much lamented when it was abolished, or perhaps a move to a London-style government which could mean dividing up Birmingham itself.
That would be fought tooth and nail by the locals, whether they would be able to succeed I don't know. At the very least I can't see the parishes – Castle Bromwich, Smith's Wood, Kingshurst, Fordbridge, Chelmsley Wood – that were transferred from Birmingham to Solihull in 1974 being passed across, if anything possibly the top third of Bickenhill north of the Coventry road going to Birmingham.
Probably like Kobe or Hong Kong, where they build along the slopes and fill in some land around some of the shallower parts of the channels.
I'd imagine that there some places in southern Chile that could have held a lot more people. It's certainly habitable and the climate there is not much different from Ireland or Scotland (with the seasons reversed). Perhaps if the area had been settled by the British, who are already used to the mild and damp weather, there could have been a much larger population in the cities and larger towns there.
It's pretty much like South Island in New Zealand in terms of climate but way more hills and mountains and fjords, although Chiloe and Araucania in the north of the area have some flatter lands (and is where the bulk of the population lives). That's bad for economic development since everything has to be moved by sea or air, and to make matters worse, it's an active volcanic and earthquake zone so crippling land infrastructure isn't hard. Not sure how you would get a lot more people there, barring something like making it the Jewish state (IIRC that was a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory at one point in Latin America). Pre-1900 you could make it a much more important and centralized civilization (potatoes were domesticated there after all) and have Spain take it over piece by piece. Yeah, most of the population will die during the conquest and its aftermath but rebounds by the modern day should make it much more populated.
Basically I'd expect development to center around Tierra del Fuego (that's presumably why the British would want it to begin with) and the Puerto Montt/Valdivia area. Most land in between would be rugged and wild outside of some ports, and I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up two separate dominions in the British Empire as a result and never united. And this would take an early 19th PoD where Britain sheers off the southern extremities of Spanish America.
Can I offer some regional options? Saskatoon & Edmonton would be bigger, had the railway followed the originally planned (& easier!) Fleming route.
That also means Regina probably doesn't exist (the capital staying in Battleford?), & Calgary is smaller.
And there's the obvious one: Boston, if the Erie Canal isn't built (for some reason).
And Detroit could be much bigger than now. It peaked at over 1mil, but has been plagued by industry withdrawal from downtown & some of the worst, most corrupt administrations in the U.S.
Butterfly either... Or even keep Lockheed (Detroit A/c)? Win the Olympic bid? (Would building the St. Lawrence Seaway earlier help?)
That also means Regina probably doesn't exist (the capital staying in Battleford?), & Calgary is smaller.
And there's the obvious one: Boston, if the Erie Canal isn't built (for some reason).
I wonder how much religion impacted that. AIUI, the Church retarded economic development, meaning Anglo businesses fled. I also wonder how much the separatista mania for French-only everything hurt.
And Detroit could be much bigger than now. It peaked at over 1mil, but has been plagued by industry withdrawal from downtown & some of the worst, most corrupt administrations in the U.S.
Butterfly either... Or even keep Lockheed (Detroit A/c)? Win the Olympic bid? (Would building the St. Lawrence Seaway earlier help?)Hong Kong manages nicely, & it's not exactly land rich...
Last edited:
Hong Kong was for a very long time the only entry point into a huge market for commerce from all over the world.Hong Kong manages nicely, & it's not exactly land rich...
A city needs a very good reason to grow to large sizes. Such as being at an important strait (Singapore), an economic gold rush attracting large amount of people (San Francisco), being the capital of a centralized empire (Paris), being the industrial center of an underindustrialized yet populous region (Moscow) or the result of plain old central planning (Shenzhen).
And you've completely missed the point. Alt-Prince Rupert would be a major port. It was the geographical parallel that was at issue.
There's no real reason for it to be a major port, not with Vancouver and Seattle close by, it's too far north. You'll still have to wait until WW2 until you get serious population movements to the US West but most would still go to California.
You can make it great by having the state set up industries there and sending recently immigrated people there, the central planning method.
Maybe funny thing that would mean Groton and New London Ct would probably grown some being on the other end of the crossing.
The original scenario for this was if the US had gotten all of the Columbia District north of Vancouver Island, while the British managed to only hold onto Prince Rupert.
- Status