Cities that feel different, despite being geographically "close"

[plain]

Newark and Jersey City. Jersey City to me feels like an NJ version of Brooklyn or something, while Newark feels like... Newark...

Norfolk and Virginia Beach. Because Norfolk for the most part looks and functions like an actual city while Virginia Beach, the former Princess Anne County, functions like an actual anything but.

Boston and Manchester. Because aside from the obvious lack of rowhomes and tri-levels and trains and such, most people in Manchester aren't jackasses 

Philadelphia and New York.

You beat me to it.

Richmond, Petersburg, and Hopewell are the classic examples of this for central Virginia:

Richmond has quite a few affluent areas and is becoming gentrified in some of the more historically economically depressed areas, though there are some areas that continue to suffer from the effects of segregated development (primarily in the southern and eastern parts of the city). It also has healthy suburbs in Henrico and Chesterfield Counties.

Petersburg has a thriving (but gentrified) old town neighborhood but is otherwise quite dilapidated, mainly due to white flight (to Colonial Heights, and Chesterfield and Dinwiddie Counties) after the collapse of the Byrd Organization, underfunding of infrastructure, and occasional corruption within the city government and its contractors. There was a long saga of Petersburg contracting companies to tear down an infamous former Ramada Inn that was visible from I-95, only for those contractors to take the city's money and run. The hotel finally got torn down a couple of years ago.

Hopewell is an economically depressed military town with a very high crime rate, and large amounts of heavy industry that encroach on low-income residential areas. There have been attempts to revitalize parts of Hopewell, particularly the downtown area, but otherwise it's a pollution-choked wasteland. It also suffered from white flight as people moved into Prince George and Chesterfield Counties, and that is likely to continue with some very high-income housing being built in southeastern Chesterfield.

The Tri-Cities (Colonial Heights included) feels different from one another despite them being so close to each other. It's real noticable between Colonial Heights and Petersburg, both in the build and the vibe.

Richmond, while it is the capital of Virginia, feels (and looks/functions) differently than literally every other city in the state, especially nowadays. Maybe a few similarities to Alexandria, but not really.

[TheStranger]

Another Philippine adjacent-city comparison:

Quezon City (capital 1948 to 1976) vs. Manila (capital before 1948 and after 1976)

- Manila as noted in the comparison to Makati, is crowded, a bit sootier, has a waterfront that was a tourist hot spot but is not the safest area (Ermita), has a historic if quiet CBD (Binondo), is not known as a tourist attraction for its malls.  It does have centuries of indigineous and colonialist history that are apparent in spots like Intramuros.

- Quezon City...

1. Because it was planned to be a master-designed capital city, a lot of the road layout towards Diliman is similar to Washington DC...except for the realities of lack of funding in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of those master planned roads got overrun with squatters in the late 1980s, after planned structures did not come to fruition. 

Further north, the NLEX Citi Link expressway project currently in planning involves right of way...that was proposed as far back as the 1950s, but overrun by informal developments through time! 

2. Has similarities to Los Angeles in that it absorbed numerous other nearby communities (namely the 1930s suburb New Manila, parts of Caloocan, and San Francisco Del Monte) into an ever-unrecognizable conurbation in which there is not really one core area.  Cubao arguably is the main CBD of Quezon City, but then parts of the Ortigas CBD and all of the Eastwood district are within the city limits)

3. Has almost as many people total as Chicago, but were it not for Skyway skirting the west edge of the city, has presently one of the worst limited-access highway networks for a multi-million resident area ever.   EDSA being turned into a sea of commercial driveways and storefronts from the 1980s on, starting with the North EDSA mall and exacerbated by Megamall at the Quezon City/Mandaluyong border in Ortigas district, really turned QC into a chokepoint for long-distance traffic that only finally got any sort of relief with Skyway's opening in late 2020.

C-5 is slated to have full expressway upgrades at some point, but also is packed too massively to have any effect as a bypass.

For comparison, Manila already has both Skyway and NLEX Connector, and a planned waterfront tunnel/port corridor is in the works.

4. The Philippine National Railways lines center around Manila, so Manila and Makati have much better rail access than the vast majority of QC.  The LRT-2 and MRT-3 lines do go into Quezon City and a proposed subway will also head through the city

5. Quezon City has very little international renown, even though an event globally associated with the city of Manila happened within its borders (the "Thrilla in Manila" Ali/Frazier III fight in 1975 at Araneta Coliseum in Cubao). 

6. Quezon City's commercial developments blend almost too seamlessly into nearby cities: the westernmost part of QC is barely distinguishable from Manila in vibe, while the portions near San Juan also look a lot like the rest of San Juan, and Ortigas is shared amongst three cities despite being its own distict.  BGC in Taguig has its own cachet and identity almost beyond that of its parent city, but definitely more publicity for modern development than any of the Quezon City areas at this point.

7. As noted earlier, QC absorbed large districts in the 1940s similar to LA's capturing of San Fernando Valley through Mulholland's water projects.  End result: those districts are more known on their own than as part of QC.  This is true even of newer developed areas like Novaliches to the far north.

8. Even QC's slum district Payatas is not as known as the Smokey Mountain dump site in northern Manila.

[Plutonic Panda]

I guess this thread really should've been about what cities are close to each other and are virtually identical. Because it seems like almost every city has its own unique identity According to this thread.

[JayhawkCO]

I guess this thread really should've been about what cities are close to each other and are virtually identical. Because it seems like almost every city has its own unique identity According to this thread.

Some off the top of my head:

Columbus and Indianapolis
Des Moines and Omaha
Orlando and Tampa
Portland and Seattle
Los Angeles and San Diego
Amarillo and Lubbock
El Paso and Las Cruces
Baltimore and Philadelphia
Charlotte and Atlanta
Savannah and Charleston

[webny99]

Yes, I'm late to the thread.   I'll offer Toronto and Buffalo as two VERY different cities in relatively close proximity to one another.

This would normally be a great use of the "like" function, but seeing as you slid it in at the top of a much longer post, I figured I would call it out specifically. Definitely agreed... you can't possibly get more different in just about every aspect imaginable: history, culture, development patterns, governance, economy, infrastructure, and even weather: Buffalo is infamous for lake effect snow while Toronto gets basically none.

[bing101]

Another Philippine adjacent-city comparison:

Quezon City (capital 1948 to 1976) vs. Manila (capital before 1948 and after 1976)

- Manila as noted in the comparison to Makati, is crowded, a bit sootier, has a waterfront that was a tourist hot spot but is not the safest area (Ermita), has a historic if quiet CBD (Binondo), is not known as a tourist attraction for its malls.  It does have centuries of indigineous and colonialist history that are apparent in spots like Intramuros.

- Quezon City...

1. Because it was planned to be a master-designed capital city, a lot of the road layout towards Diliman is similar to Washington DC...except for the realities of lack of funding in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of those master planned roads got overrun with squatters in the late 1980s, after planned structures did not come to fruition. 

Further north, the NLEX Citi Link expressway project currently in planning involves right of way...that was proposed as far back as the 1950s, but overrun by informal developments through time! 

2. Has similarities to Los Angeles in that it absorbed numerous other nearby communities (namely the 1930s suburb New Manila, parts of Caloocan, and San Francisco Del Monte) into an ever-unrecognizable conurbation in which there is not really one core area.  Cubao arguably is the main CBD of Quezon City, but then parts of the Ortigas CBD and all of the Eastwood district are within the city limits)

3. Has almost as many people total as Chicago, but were it not for Skyway skirting the west edge of the city, has presently one of the worst limited-access highway networks for a multi-million resident area ever.  EDSA being turned into a sea of commercial driveways and storefronts from the 1980s on, starting with the North EDSA mall and exacerbated by Megamall at the Quezon City/Mandaluyong border in Ortigas district, really turned QC into a chokepoint for long-distance traffic that only finally got any sort of relief with Skyway's opening in late 2020.

C-5 is slated to have full expressway upgrades at some point, but also is packed too massively to have any effect as a bypass.

For comparison, Manila already has both Skyway and NLEX Connector, and a planned waterfront tunnel/port corridor is in the works.

4. The Philippine National Railways lines center around Manila, so Manila and Makati have much better rail access than the vast majority of QC.  The LRT-2 and MRT-3 lines do go into Quezon City and a proposed subway will also head through the city

5. Quezon City has very little international renown, even though an event globally associated with the city of Manila happened within its borders (the "Thrilla in Manila" Ali/Frazier III fight in 1975 at Araneta Coliseum in Cubao). 

6. Quezon City's commercial developments blend almost too seamlessly into nearby cities: the westernmost part of QC is barely distinguishable from Manila in vibe, while the portions near San Juan also look a lot like the rest of San Juan, and Ortigas is shared amongst three cities despite being its own distict.  BGC in Taguig has its own cachet and identity almost beyond that of its parent city, but definitely more publicity for modern development than any of the Quezon City areas at this point.

7. As noted earlier, QC absorbed large districts in the 1940s similar to LA's capturing of San Fernando Valley through Mulholland's water projects.  End result: those districts are more known on their own than as part of QC.  This is true even of newer developed areas like Novaliches to the far north.

8. Even QC's slum district Payatas is not as known as the Smokey Mountain dump site in northern Manila.

Another one Baguio City, Philippines it's a major city on top of the highest mountains in Luzon and is less humid than other parts of the country. This city is a multi hour drive from Manila that it's akin to driving from Sacramento to San Diego on I-5. This city gets mentioned for having a different climate zone than the rest of the Philippines.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baguio

[bing101]

Oahu vs Maui in Hawaii

Oahu has the most people in the state of Hawaii and gets compared to places like Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco in a tropical setting if one is in the Honolulu area.

Maui if you remove the 2023 wildfires off the picture resembles California's central coast.