Western Connecticut Planning Region Map with Towns and Land Area

How to use this map

The map opens on the Divisions view with all 18 of Western Connecticut Planning Region’s municipalities drawn straight from Census boundary files. Click any one to pin it and read its figures: land area in square kilometres, 2020 population and the density that falls out of those two. The tabs above the map change what the shading means. Divisions gives each unit its own colour so you can tell neighbours apart at a glance. Land area shades by size. Satellite drops one metre aerial imagery under the boundaries. Blank outline strips the fill away for printing or tracing.

The figure people misread is land area. Census land area excludes water, so a municipality with a lake or a river frontage looks smaller in the table than it does on the map. Greenwich is the clearest case here: its boundary encloses 174.11 square kilometres but only 123.6 of that is land, leaving 50.51 as water. If you are measuring something that sits on the ground, use the land figure. If you are measuring something that follows the boundary, use the polygon.

What this planning region is made of

Western Connecticut Planning Region holds 18 towns. New Milford is the largest by land area at 159.45 square kilometres and Darien the smallest at 32.77, which makes the largest roughly 4.9 times the size of the smallest. The median sits at 57.48 square kilometres, so the spread is wide but most units cluster nearer the middle than the extremes.

Stamford is the largest by population at 135,470, about 22 per cent of the planning region total. Norwalk is the densest at 1,537.9 people per square kilometre and Bridgewater the emptiest at 39.1, a ratio of about 39 to one. Bridgewater has 1,662 people.

Across the whole planning region the density is 450.2 people per square kilometre. That is the number to hold on to, because it explains the shape of the map: a few dense nodes and a long tail of thinly settled ground, with the average describing almost none of the individual units.

Where the data comes from

Boundaries come from the Census Bureau TIGERweb planning region subdivision layer, which is the authoritative source for municipal geography in Connecticut. Land area is the Census land measurement, which excludes inland water. Population is the 2020 Decennial Census count for each municipality.

The sources are joined on municipality name, and that join is worth checking rather than trusting. The 18 land areas sum to 1,378.27 square kilometres against a published planning region land area of 1,378.26, which agrees to the hundredth. The 18 populations sum to 620,549, which is the published planning region total to the person.

Aerial imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite tab pulls one metre aerial imagery from the USGS National Map. One metre means each pixel covers roughly a square metre of ground, so at full zoom you can pick out individual buildings, field boundaries and the line of a farm track. That resolution matters at this scale. The national and state maps on this site use a NASA composite at five hundred metres per pixel, which is fine for showing where Connecticut sits in the country and useless for showing where a municipal line runs.

The boundaries are drawn in an Albers equal area projection fitted to this planning region, with standard parallels set inside its own latitude range. Equal area matters here because the map is shaded by area: if the projection distorted area, the shading would be lying. The imagery arrives in Web Mercator and is reprojected to match.

A check you can repeat on paper

Take Stamford. Its land area is 97.46 square kilometres and its 2020 population is 135,470. Divide 135,470 by 97.46 and you get 1390.01 people per square kilometre, which is what the panel shows rounded to 1,390.

Now check it against the planning region. Stamford holds 21.8 per cent of the 620,549 people on 7.1 per cent of the 1,378.27 square kilometres. That gap between population share and land share is the whole story of the map in one comparison.

Mistakes that catch people out

Reading polygon area as land area. The map draws boundaries, and boundaries include water. This planning region encloses 1,604.38 square kilometres of polygon against 1,378.27 of land, so 226.11 is water, about 14.1 per cent.

Assuming a city is bigger than a town. In Connecticut those words describe charter type, not size. Darien town is the smallest unit here at 32.77 square kilometres.

Expecting the average to describe a unit. At 450.2 per square kilometre the planning region average sits between Bridgewater at 39.1 and Norwalk at 1,537.9, and matches neither.

Assuming municipal lines follow roads or rivers. Many were surveyed as charter grants or survey townships long before the roads existed. The straight lines on this map are the original survey, not modern infrastructure.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Connecticut County Map, for all 9 counties and where Western Connecticut sits among them
• United States Map, for the national view and how Connecticut compares
• Massachusetts County Map, for the same treatment applied to another New England state
• US Census Bureau Geography, the source for boundaries, land area and population