What's your oddly empty area of the world?

A place you think more people SHOULD live but don't.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Over the years I’ve made a bit of a name for myself by exploring where people live and, more specifically, where they don’t live. There’s a reason for everything, of course. Cities and population centers don’t just spring up over night — aside from Oklahoma City but that’s a different story for a different day. Regardless, I see some variation of this question pop up all over social media all the time:

Why isn’t there a city in …. ?

Or

Why don’t more people live here?

The confluence of the Mississippi River and the Ohio River

In fact, one of the places most referenced in this kind of question is at the confluence of the Mississippi River and the Ohio River in the United States. These two rivers are absolutely massive and both played a huge role in enabling the growth of the United States. So one would naturally think that more people would live here right? These are two major rivers. Cities historically formed along major rivers and particularly at the confluence of rivers (see Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Portland). So why would early settlers ignore establishing a trading port at the confluence of these two specifically? Well, they didn’t! It just appears that way because the town that’s there today never grew into a larger city.

At the confluence of these two rivers is Cairo, Illinois. During the 1800s it was an important stop and trading post along both of these rivers. And it actually had some fairly robust growth during its early decades after it was founded. But after topping out at about 15,000 people in 1920, it saw decade after decade of slow decline. In fact, per the 2020 census, only 1,733 people still lived in the town. There are, of course, reasons for this. Early floods caused constant issues. Economic decline brought on by newly completely railroads diminished the need for ferries and trade by river. And then there was a very ugly racist campaign in the mid 1900s which was, unfortunately, not uncommon for many places during this time. And so, because of that series of events, Cairo diminished. Such is the life of countless cities and towns across the world.

This all leads to the point of this post, which wasn’t actually supposed to be this long:

What area of the planet do you think should have more people or a city but, for some reason, doesn’t?

That place that makes you think that if things had gone just a little differently, a lot more people would have ended up here. I think everyone who is interested in population geography probably has at least one or two places they’ve pondered this question over.