Demographics of Fictional DC Cities

One of the biggest problems with DC’s fictional cities is that the big two always fight to make themselves the biggest. For example, both Metropolis and Gotham City are quoted with populations in excess of New York’s real-world population.

We can break it down further:

• Thematically, Metropolis and Gotham City echo New York, so it is reasonable to say that New York’s special status is lost in the DCU. Some part of NY’s population will have gone elsewhere. It is still a big city, just not the biggest.
• Economically, Gotham has more crime, which suggests a more depressed economy. That is less attractive to modern incomers.
• Gleaming Metropolis will look far more attractive. It should be a world leader, certainly the largest city in the “Western World.”
• Coast City exists but is not shown to eclipse Los Angeles, so it will be smaller.
• Central City with Keystone City are probably in the Philadephia/Phoenix range (large, but not big three).

Methodology

Realistically, these cities should follow something called Zipf’s law, a power-law scaling of city-size based on the city’s rank order. That says, if you rank the cities in a country by decreasing population (New York = 1, Los Angeles = 2, etc.), then their populations will be related by:

The population of City 2 = Population of City 1 * ( Rank of City 1 / Rank of City 2 )

Using this we can regenerate the populations of America’s top ten cities, including these four DC cities (Metropolis, Gotham City, Coast City, Central/Keystone). The trick is to pick a scaling that allows most cities to retain their approximate real-world population levels but does not make Metropolis (the Rank 1 City) stupidly large.

Results

The table below shows the ranked list of cities by population in the DCU. There are six real cities and four fictional ones. The columns “Real” and “Zipf” show the actual population of the real cities and their inferred population using the Zipf rule. The result is reasonably close, albeit with some scatter in the second significant figure.

The final column, “Fictional”, shows what we would infer about the cities if we included the four fictional ones. A population of 6.8 million in New York is down a bit, but this value allows the scale for the lower-ranked cities to remain relatively unchanged. Chicago is the break-even point. Any higher, Metropolis looks ridiculously large. As it is, at 13.6 million, Metropolis will be equal in size to Tokyo and will be about the 10th largest city in the World.

The overall distribution seems fair, with Chicago coming out unchanged. New York is reduced, as it would always be, but the others seem to come out okay. The actual percentages we quote will depend on the maps we use.

Caveats

A more realistic way of doing this is to take the fictional maps of these cities, compute their area, and then assign a population density to each borough or district. The trouble with that is we often only have maps of the very centre of each city. Gotham is the poster child for this. We have the brilliant Brown map for Gotham’s core but know virtually nothing about its suburbs.