Shanghai housing density

This morning I went for a walk in Heping Park, which is on the border between the Hongkou and Yangpu districts and about a mile from where we are staying. To get there, rather than taking the subway to the Siping Road stop, I walked along Fuxin Road, which runs through a residential neighborhood which was probably built in the 1950's or early 1960's when Shanghai's population was skyrocketing.

The park itself is about 240 acres and was built in 1958, at the same time as Yangpu Park two miles or so to its east. It was crammed with people. The occupations were the usual: old men chatting and fanning themselves, others airing their songbirds, people doing solo or group Taiqi and exercises, group dances, people practicing instruments or singing, mothers or grandmothers with children, and people just sitting around. Almost every potential seat on benches, walls, stones, and elsewhere was occupied. I only walked around half of it, and informally counted thousands of people. My guess is that there were well over 5,000, possible twice that. The sidewalks around the gates were so dense with parked bicycles that pedestrians had to walk in the street.

The reason is not hard to guess -- Shanghai in late July is sweltering, even at 8:00 in the morning, and most of the apartments surrounding the park do not have air conditioning. While those along the main roads are modern high-rises, those behind them are brick and concrete apartments blocks from 60 or so years ago. I wondered, how many people did the park serve?

Shanghai's overall population density is between 2700 and 3700 people per square kilometer depending whose statistics one uses. But much of this is not densely populated. The Hongkou district where the park is has an average population density of 34,000 people per square kilometer. The downtown areas of the old foreign concessions, where much of the old Shikumen housing had densities of 7000 people per block have an average density of around 50,000 people per square kilometer. Looking at the mass of apartments which filled the blocks near the park, that did not seem high.

Some of the newer apartment blocks had window air conditioners, so I used them to count the probable number of apartments per floor. 12 per side, so 24 per floor. The buildings have between 5 and 7 floors, so that means 120 to 168 apartments per building. Shanghai has an average occupation rate of a bit over 3 people per apartment, so each of the buildings would house on average 360 to 500 people. Assuming that 6 stories is the average, that means about 432 per building. I couldn't count the number of apartments per block due to the density. So I went to Google Maps and used the satellite view. The neighborhoods through which I was walking averaged 126 apartment buildings per square half kilometer! That gives a density of 226,800 people per square kilometer. Subtract a bit for streets and shops, and there are probably about 225,000.

That makes sense given the overall data. Dense housing blocks make up only a fraction of the area (if nothing else, the universities, parks, business and public buildings need lots of space), but the housing areas are dense indeed. Given that the apartment blocks are at least twice the height of the old Shikumen slums, the density should be comparable even with more space per person. But not much -- I gather the apartments average no more than 500 square feet.

At any rate, given that there are several such dense housing areas on each side of the park, the catchment area has a population of over a million people. Five or ten thousand people going to the park on a stifling day would not be surprising.