Abstract: | The legal city and the urbanized area fail to depict accurately the physical area of urban development and therefore prevent an accurate calculation of population densities. When underbounding occurs, densities tend to be unrealistically high and with overbounding they are low. Delimitations made by air photo interpretation demonstrate that the physical city, measured on a 21/2 acre scale of generalization, provides a more accurate basis for calculating population densities of urban areas than either the legal city or urbanized area because the bounding problems are eliminated. |