Population Density in the United States Urbanized Areas

摘要

Optimizing the design of a blast shelter program based on the principle of a balanced defense requires a fairly accurate knowledge of the distribution of the population density in the urbanized areas on a micro-scale, using areas as small as one mile. Using the census tract data made available by the Census Bureau and the Office of Civil Defense, this paper develops a model of the micro-population density distribution throughout the urbanized areas of the United States. Our results are based on (1) a detailed examination of the five largest central cities, (2) a combination of the micro-examination and statistics for the other 208 central cities, and (3) a crude sub-model for the urban fringe areas. The main results of our calculations show first the number of people (1960) in each of the selected density categories, and second, the national cost of providing blast shelters for them close to their residences. (Author)