How big is New York City in square miles including height of buildings added?

Answer 1

There is no such thing as "square miles including height." You are misunderstanding the units of measure.

Miles, feet, inches, yards, centimeters, meters, kilometers, etc. are all units that measure length and distance: "the boardwalk is 4 miles long," "this refrigerator is 5 meters wide," or "it's 25 kilometers from here to Berlin."

Square miles, square feet, square kilometers, etc., measure area, which is length x width (length multiplied by width): "New York City is 468.8 square miles or 1214.4 square kilometers," "this table is 10 square feet" (2 feet wide multiplied by 5 feet long), or "a standard playing card is 8 square inches" (4 inches long x 2 inches wide).

Measuring the size of the city including the height of the buildings is a cubic measure. A cubic measure is a measure of volume, and you use cubic units to measure volume: cubic miles, cubic kilometers, cubic meters, cubic feet, etc.

Put simply, volume is the way you would measure the amount of space inside a cube (or a building, or any 3-dimensional object): length x width x height. You cannot use square miles or square kilometers (or square ANYTHING) to measure volume, because square miles/kilometers/etc. are a measure of area, which is a 2-dimensional measurement.

For example, say you have a shoebox. The sides of the box are flat (2-dimensional), and thus are measured by area: the length of each side times the width of each side equals the area of each side (however many square inches or square centimeters that is). The amount of space inside the box is 3-dimensional, and is measured by volume: length x width x height = however many cubic inches or centimeters the box contains.

You use square miles, square kilometers, square inches, etc. to measure area, while you use cubic miles, cubic kilometers and cubic inches to measure volume.

You cannot use a measure of length x width (a 2-dimensional measurement) to find the value of a measure of length x width x height (a 3-dimensional measurement). Put simply, asking for the size of New York City "in square miles including height" is like asking,"What is the speed of an Amtrak commuter train in inches?" or "What is the length of this sofa in miles per hour?"

The area of New York City is 468.8 square miles. To find the cubic volume of New York City (length x width x height) you would first have to find the exact dimensions of every single building, house or structure in New York City, and that is impossible. There are tens of thousands of buildings in New York City, big and small. It would take years to compile all that data, and by the time you were done, the data would be obsolete, since old buildings are torn down and new ones built everywhere in the city on a regular basis.