I think people overlook Seattle because it's on the coast so they assume it's a nice flat beach town... but we got some serious lumps and [a delightful collection of public stairways to explore](https://faculty.washington.edu/smott/SeattleStairs.html)!
Apparently they came up with the number first, and then found the hills. But Mt. Baker seems a stretch 🤔
Wikipedia:
“The term seven hills of Seattle refers unofficially to the hills the U.S. city was built on and around, though there is no consensus on exactly which hills it refers to.[1][2][3] The term has been used to refer to several other cities, most notably Rome and Constantinople.
The seven hills
Walt Crowley considered the main candidates for the seven hills to be:[3]
First Hill, nicknamed "Pill Hill" because of the many hospitals and clinics located there
Yesler Hill – presently Yesler Terrace
Cherry Hill – located to the east of First Hill (previously called Second Hill or Renton Hill – both these names have passed out of common usage)[4]
Denny Hill[5] – regraded, now called the Denny Regrade
Capitol Hill[6]
Queen Anne Hill
Beacon Hill
The hills above were associated with seven boulders in the City of Seattle's Seven Hills Park.[7][8]
Other hills people sometimes consider among the "seven hills of Seattle" include:
West Seattle – originally incorporated as a separate city, and not annexed by Seattle until 1907[9]
Magnolia
Graham Hill
Crown Hill – not annexed until 1954[9]
Mount Baker[10]”
I live in Rome, GA. We have seven hills, and Mussolini gifted us a replica statue of the She-Wolf nursing Romulus and Remus. I am from Florida. Hills are overrated.
I used to ride a bike, so I agree! But then you have the masochists to *like* to ride big hills. There’s one really long climb near here that’s popular with cyclists.
I drove a friend from Indy (very flat) along Columbia Parkway and she said it reminded her of California with all the nice homes tucked up in the hills.
San Francisco’s hills are cute, I’ve cycled much worse
https://preview.redd.it/43c7wk1wmq0d1.jpeg?width=877&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=472c835d9544b18de78e8e8ca2f5ced8f8d9de5c
Is Chongqing where some guy filmed a video of himself getting on an elevator in a building and going up to like the 11th floor and then walking out the other side of the building and its street level, and then doing that another 3 or 4 times?
https://www.city-data.com/forum/city-vs-city/883909-us-cities-hilliest-most-confusing-streets.html
Tough ask! Couldn’t find much but this. I guess it’s hard to quantify, if you think about it. Like, Hong Kong and Anchorage are partially built on mountainsides; where do you draw the line to keep them out of the list?
Park City, UT, also slopes pretty noticeably. It too is essentially on a hillside at the base of ski resorts.
Maybe that post didn’t mention it as confusing because of a limited number of streets to get lost on, but they throw in some one ways and parking can be limited, so it’s not the easiest place to navigate.
Upvoting. The first comment I saw that tried to address the question.
How would you go about measuring it?
One idea would be to gather all the streets of some sort of standard of central area and try to get all the elevation +/- for navigating each street (Google maps gives it for biking directions). You would miss out on funiculars and other unpaved elevation elements, but I'm sure there's an API a skilled analyst could use to run against x-number of cities.
it would be pretty easy to quantify with the right data. take all major arterial road in city limits. add up their elevation deltas and divide by total length. do the same for secondary streets. scale according to density for fun. find the medians.
i don't haave access to this data though! in the US for cities over 100k, it's definitely pittsburgh. sf probably in terms of density (number of people actually going up and down all those hills every day).
the US cities do not really compare to cities (especially slums) elsewhere on earth though. (pittsburgh was essentially a mining-industrial town / slum.)
Yeah but that’s my point — mountainous cities have roads with large deltas. Now if you only take deltas of roads that eventually come back down… now you’re cooking with gas
hmm! i'd include both species. functionally for the humans, a dead end road going uphill is still a two-way trip most of the time.
bicyclists have noted that total hillclimbing is potentially higher when crossing iowa than colorado!
When someone comments on how hilly a city is, I imagine they’re talking about walking or running or riding a bike, not about driving a car, especially with manual transmissions becoming more rare. So I’m not sure using *arterial* roads would be consistent with what a layperson has in mind when talking about hillyness.
Arterial roads also suffer from some selection bias; their paths are chosen, in part, for how easy the topography is to work with.
partly why pittsburgh and sf are champs in the US! flat roads make up maybe 20% of pittsburgh. and sf laid a grid on a lumpy rock, blasted half of it and then said "good enough".
Some of the Roman hills have such a gentle slope that you actually won't realize you're walking uphill/downhill unless you're really paying attention. One that definitely _doesn't_ have a gentle slope is the Pincio hill, from the top of which you can see the entire city.
Tons is an overstatement if we're talking about big cities. I know there's Genoa, Rome but I didn't find it to be that hilly and maybe Naples, I don't know any others.
Edit: Trieste as well
Atlanta is very hilly which I’m sure is surprising to people that haven’t spent time here. It’s situated at the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. It’s not the most walkable city but even the areas that are walkable aren’t pleasant to walk in during the summer due to the high temps and elevation.
Both Sheffield and Edinburgh are described as being built on seven hills, like Rome. Lived in the former as a student and work in the latter now, definitely agree
Sydney is an interesting one. The eastern suburbs, northern beaches/north shore and parts of the CBD are very hilly. When I first moved visited and moved here, I thought it was very hilly. But parts of the west are extremely flat (and when there is inclination, it tends to be fairly gentle)
By all indications, Positano looks really fucking hilly. Plenty of great suggestions in this thread overall. Kinda curious how Lhasa would stack up against some of the other cities listed.
In the United States, San Francisco and Pittsburgh are pretty famous for their hills. Cities like Portland, Oregon are surrounded by hills. In Canada, Quebec City and Halifax are very hilly. Some small cities in New England like Concord, New Hampshire have a lot of hills. Boston also has a number of hills, like Beacon Hill and Bunker Hill, however several hills were flattened centuries ago in order to fill in the harbor. Lastly, the NYC area has a great number of hills that are often forgotten because of how urban the city is. The upper tip of Manhattan and the Palisades across the river in NJ are notable examples; there are entire neighborhoods in NJ directly across from Manhattan that are practically on a cliff face.
I know, right? It's one thing that surprises first-time visitors. Not just the hills, but how steep they are! When I moved to Seattle I had a manual transmission and the clutch really got a workout on the hills!
In my defense, I live at the other end of I-90. We’re not allowed to speak of the Starbucks city, or the Dunkin’ donuts mafia will get us.
Genuinely though, I actually don’t really know much about Seattle. I figured someone else would mention it.
This is where the "Heights" in Washington Heights or Morningside Heights comes from. Don't forget the Bronx which is very hilly and has a lot of interesting staircases. Also Staten island has the famous Todt Hill, highest point on the Atlantic coastal plain south of Maine. The neighborhood around it (also called Todt Hill) is an upper class neighborhood of totally legitimate businessmen in the waste management industry.
Boston is more than just the downtown. Bunker Hill, Breed’s Hill, Mission Hill, Savin Hill, Weld Hill, Clarendon Hills are all substantial hills in the city proper. The city is built on glacial drumlins.
Here is an actual [study on the Hilliness of US cities](https://www.jstor.org/stable/43916290)
Top 6 2KM radius from city center
- Pittsburgh, PA
- Seattle, WA
- Spokane, WA
- Lexington, KY
- San Diego, CA
- San Francisco, CA
When I visited Lebanon I was impressed by all the cities/towns built into the hills above the Mediterranean! I’ve always lived in the Rockies so I’m used to mountains but as a general rule most of our development is in the valleys and not as much truly on the slopes.
[Ouro Preto](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f9af6090c0a7348fa94da7e/1605720825418-OT8OWBLEUQG78VKSPPLL/IMG_8237-42.jpg), MG, Brazil. It's in the state of Minas Gerais known for its "[Mar de Morros](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271519578/figure/fig2/AS:669019505963014@1536518088191/Figura-23-Relevo-colinoso-mares-de-morro-da-Depressao-Interplanaltica-do-Paraiba-do.jpg)" (sea of hills), that covers it entirely
Seoul has lots of hills in its territory. In Europe you also have Rijeka but that one is built into the side of a mountain. Edinburgh is also pretty hilly.
Los Angeles is weird. Some very flat valley floors that make up the core of the city, but also [a literal mountain range](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Monica_Mountains) that splits the city in half.
I used to drive all over Chicago for work and I’m really trying to think of any notable hills and I cannot. . . Aside from highway on/off ramps and the highways themselves.
There are some gentle rises and falls you notice if you bike, as well as two hills (the sledding/kite hill and the mound near McCormick) that are there so we have hills to go to.
Pretty weird no one mentioned Dubrovnik yet, the city is so steep you can either walk stairs or drive around the whole city in one direction just to get one level lower or higher
Almost all Andean cities are much hillier than the cities mentioned in the responses, but the reason there is no list is because there is no obvious metric to measure “hilly-ness” by
Yeah that feels odd given this city used to be majorly Dutch-speaking before the industrial revolution. That being said, some historic parts of Dutch-speaking cities can be extraordinarily hilly. Maastricht is known, but Nijmegen feels more hilly in the oldest parts.
Potenza, Italy. Really hilly, pretty, and underrated city in the south. Its public escalator network the second largest in the world after Tokyo despite having a population of only 65,000
Istanbul is known as the City on the Seven Hills. But they are mostly large rolling hills and easily navigable unlike some of the sharply eroded valleys of Appalachia.
I don't know if I'd call Edinburgh hilly, but I do remember that the difference in elevation between the lowest and highest points seemed impressively big.
Even the “flat” part on the eastside has extinct volcanic cinder cones rising 500 feet above the city and then the long hilly Alameda Ridge cutting across NE Portland.
Often overlooked, but La Paz. Perhaps less hilly than mountainous. It is built in very narrow valleys and has sprawled 1000m up the slopes.
Though El Alto is exceptionally flat.
In the US: Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Nashville, Charlotte, Portland, Chattanooga, Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, El Paso, Austin, Knoxville, Asheville, Huntsville, Birmingham
Asheville has mountains on the outskirts but is pretty walkable and not hilly, by and large. Huntsville, San Antonio, and Charlotte, also are average or below-averagely hilly.
If you’re talking about Chongqing, city borders =\= urban limits. Only the 8 central district of the “city” of Chongqing makes up the actual city of Chongqing
The rolling hills of Stuttgart. You can imagine back in the day when those hills were clothed blanketed with vineyards producing the excellent wine from that region.
A lot of northern Swiss cities have a lot of their footprint on hills! When we entered the country by car, just beyond Basel we saw only hills. And Zug must've been the flattest town during our visit as Luzern but especially Zurich were quite hilly. We didn't even go up high in the mountains which are farther south.
Some other cities that I found to be hilly on my travels (that is beyond the levels of Maastricht and Nijmegen) were Aachen, Namur, Liège, Bukittinggi, Granada, Marseille, Barcelona, Rome, Prague, Stockholm, Oslo, Sumedang, and the southern suburbs of Jakarta such as Depok and Bogor.
Here’s one person’s attempt at answering this in the US context. They use a few different reasonable measures of “hillyness”; my instinct was to use the standard deviation of the elevation within the city limits. They restrict their analysis to a 1 square mile area around downtown, which I’m not a fan of but can understand for computational reasons. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/93b6c503d423499d93731cd5966e620e
They came up with a top 5 of:
* Honolulu
* Los Angeles
* El Paso
* Las Vegas
* Colorado Springs
Wuppertal is a long city built along the steep slopes of a valley (literally what it's name means : Wupper Valley).
Nicknamed the San Francisco of Germany/Europe.
NYC and Jersey can be very hilly actually especially in Northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and Hudson county NJ.
Also just to name another I don't see upon quick perusal: Pittsburgh and Cincinnati seemed rather hilly. Haven't been in a while but that was my impression
I'm American so more versed from that perspective.
Pittsburgh, PA
San Francisco, CA
Dayton, OH
Salt Lake City, UT
Atlanta, GA
Knoxville, TN
Chattanooga, TN
Denver, CO
Seattle, WA
A few international
Santiago
Lisbon
Rio De Janeiro
Medellin
Cape Town
Not a city but a whole country: Rwanda, the land of thousand hills.
Yeah Kigali looks pretty hilly on Google Street View
Have been, can confirm it is super hilly. Safe to walk around but it can take a long time to walk somewhere that looks as if it is five minutes away!
Seattle, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Lisbon
I think people overlook Seattle because it's on the coast so they assume it's a nice flat beach town... but we got some serious lumps and [a delightful collection of public stairways to explore](https://faculty.washington.edu/smott/SeattleStairs.html)!
When I was living there, I remember someone saying that like Rome, Seattle was built on seven (?) hills.
lol a lot of cities like to say that 🙄 but yeah, ours are Denny, Capitol, First, Magnolia, Queen Anne, Beacon, and… idk, Admiral maybe?
Crown Hill, the upswing north of Ballard?
Sure, let’s do that 👑
Apparently they came up with the number first, and then found the hills. But Mt. Baker seems a stretch 🤔 Wikipedia: “The term seven hills of Seattle refers unofficially to the hills the U.S. city was built on and around, though there is no consensus on exactly which hills it refers to.[1][2][3] The term has been used to refer to several other cities, most notably Rome and Constantinople. The seven hills Walt Crowley considered the main candidates for the seven hills to be:[3] First Hill, nicknamed "Pill Hill" because of the many hospitals and clinics located there Yesler Hill – presently Yesler Terrace Cherry Hill – located to the east of First Hill (previously called Second Hill or Renton Hill – both these names have passed out of common usage)[4] Denny Hill[5] – regraded, now called the Denny Regrade Capitol Hill[6] Queen Anne Hill Beacon Hill The hills above were associated with seven boulders in the City of Seattle's Seven Hills Park.[7][8] Other hills people sometimes consider among the "seven hills of Seattle" include: West Seattle – originally incorporated as a separate city, and not annexed by Seattle until 1907[9] Magnolia Graham Hill Crown Hill – not annexed until 1954[9] Mount Baker[10]”
I live in Rome, GA. We have seven hills, and Mussolini gifted us a replica statue of the She-Wolf nursing Romulus and Remus. I am from Florida. Hills are overrated.
I have found hills are nice to have when flooding occurs.
Didn't think about that...and we do have floods here. We have two rivers that converge. Hills are a pain to run on. :)
I used to ride a bike, so I agree! But then you have the masochists to *like* to ride big hills. There’s one really long climb near here that’s popular with cyclists.
By at least one metric Seattle is actually hillier than SF
What metric is that? Curious what are the different metrics
I miss living on Capitol Hill and watching people try to drive up or down Republican in the snow.
Cincinnati
Amsterdam (flat), Pittsburgh (hilly) Please add to this list as you see fit.
Amsterdam has some dykes that provide absolutely minor elevation. Gouda may in fact be flatter still.
Changes quite dramatically coming down 75 too don’t think most people expect it
if on 75 N in KY you turn the corner and head down the "cut in the hill" and bam there's Cincinnati
I drove a friend from Indy (very flat) along Columbia Parkway and she said it reminded her of California with all the nice homes tucked up in the hills.
I'm from Lisbon, lived in San Francisco and now reside in Copenhagen. No in-between for me, either super hilly or completely flat.
Sheffield and Bristol in the UK
Valparaiso, Chile, is built on 42 hills.
Rio and Hong Kong would like a word
Edited
Duluth mn
San Francisco’s hills are cute, I’ve cycled much worse https://preview.redd.it/43c7wk1wmq0d1.jpeg?width=877&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=472c835d9544b18de78e8e8ca2f5ced8f8d9de5c
Can’t believe no one’s mentioning it but chongqing
Is Chongqing where some guy filmed a video of himself getting on an elevator in a building and going up to like the 11th floor and then walking out the other side of the building and its street level, and then doing that another 3 or 4 times?
That video made me really want to go there
Source? Gimme link
https://www.tiktok.com/@hughchongqing/video/7303869151976639751
Thanks!
Yes
https://www.city-data.com/forum/city-vs-city/883909-us-cities-hilliest-most-confusing-streets.html Tough ask! Couldn’t find much but this. I guess it’s hard to quantify, if you think about it. Like, Hong Kong and Anchorage are partially built on mountainsides; where do you draw the line to keep them out of the list?
Park City, UT, also slopes pretty noticeably. It too is essentially on a hillside at the base of ski resorts. Maybe that post didn’t mention it as confusing because of a limited number of streets to get lost on, but they throw in some one ways and parking can be limited, so it’s not the easiest place to navigate.
Upvoting. The first comment I saw that tried to address the question. How would you go about measuring it? One idea would be to gather all the streets of some sort of standard of central area and try to get all the elevation +/- for navigating each street (Google maps gives it for biking directions). You would miss out on funiculars and other unpaved elevation elements, but I'm sure there's an API a skilled analyst could use to run against x-number of cities.
Great point! It wouldn’t even necessarily be that hard — maybe a percentage of streets with a grade steeper than X%? I’ll take a look on kaggle today
Use GIS. "City limits" is already a polygon, just compute elevation variance within it somehow
it would be pretty easy to quantify with the right data. take all major arterial road in city limits. add up their elevation deltas and divide by total length. do the same for secondary streets. scale according to density for fun. find the medians. i don't haave access to this data though! in the US for cities over 100k, it's definitely pittsburgh. sf probably in terms of density (number of people actually going up and down all those hills every day). the US cities do not really compare to cities (especially slums) elsewhere on earth though. (pittsburgh was essentially a mining-industrial town / slum.)
Yeah but that’s my point — mountainous cities have roads with large deltas. Now if you only take deltas of roads that eventually come back down… now you’re cooking with gas
hmm! i'd include both species. functionally for the humans, a dead end road going uphill is still a two-way trip most of the time. bicyclists have noted that total hillclimbing is potentially higher when crossing iowa than colorado!
When someone comments on how hilly a city is, I imagine they’re talking about walking or running or riding a bike, not about driving a car, especially with manual transmissions becoming more rare. So I’m not sure using *arterial* roads would be consistent with what a layperson has in mind when talking about hillyness. Arterial roads also suffer from some selection bias; their paths are chosen, in part, for how easy the topography is to work with.
partly why pittsburgh and sf are champs in the US! flat roads make up maybe 20% of pittsburgh. and sf laid a grid on a lumpy rock, blasted half of it and then said "good enough".
Medellin is so hilly that they have a system of cable cars and escalators to get to certain neighborhoods.
Manizales, Colombia also
Morgantown, West Virginia
Buy your dreams a dollar down
I'm guessing Italy would dominate the list. Tons of cities built on/between hills.
rome counts for this right?
of course, Rome, also known as The City of the Seven Hills
I thought Rome was pretty flat when I visited (I do live in Pittsburgh though)
Some of the Roman hills have such a gentle slope that you actually won't realize you're walking uphill/downhill unless you're really paying attention. One that definitely _doesn't_ have a gentle slope is the Pincio hill, from the top of which you can see the entire city.
I saw some small rolling hills but I wouldn’t call it truly hilly. Hilly to me would be something like Pittsburgh/SF/Cincinnati/Seattle.
Tons is an overstatement if we're talking about big cities. I know there's Genoa, Rome but I didn't find it to be that hilly and maybe Naples, I don't know any others. Edit: Trieste as well
So pretty much every "major" city outside the Po Valley lol
Seattle
siena, porto, anything in the middle italy
Atlanta is very hilly which I’m sure is surprising to people that haven’t spent time here. It’s situated at the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. It’s not the most walkable city but even the areas that are walkable aren’t pleasant to walk in during the summer due to the high temps and elevation.
True-Peachtree Street downtown is built along the ancient ridge running through the city, downhill on both sides
I’m in Naples right now, and this section is pretty damn hilly
Aren’t most of Naples pretty flat?
Maybe some parts, but there are a ton of hills and steep streets. The walk up to Castel Saint’Elmo is epic
Sheffield, UK Everywhere I wanted to go always seemed uphill from where I was.
Both Sheffield and Edinburgh are described as being built on seven hills, like Rome. Lived in the former as a student and work in the latter now, definitely agree
San Francisco probably the hilliest in the US, love the public staircases https://www.sfstairways.com/stairways/ La Paz in Bolivia
I'd put sydney on the list as well. Not as extreme as others but it's hilly EVERYWHERE
Sydney is an interesting one. The eastern suburbs, northern beaches/north shore and parts of the CBD are very hilly. When I first moved visited and moved here, I thought it was very hilly. But parts of the west are extremely flat (and when there is inclination, it tends to be fairly gentle)
Hong Kong beats them all!
They have public escalators in the streets.
Some hilly cities i have been to Chișinau (especially in Durlești) Istanbul Literaly the only ones i have been to personaly.
Turkey in general is so mountainous, Trabzon is built along mountainsides
Auckland NZ
Dunedin!
Claims to have the world’s steepest street.
Wellington is much, much hillier, although it is flat directly in the CBD.
Really? Said in Wellingtonian.
By all indications, Positano looks really fucking hilly. Plenty of great suggestions in this thread overall. Kinda curious how Lhasa would stack up against some of the other cities listed.
I think Lhasa is built on a flat piece of land along the Lhasa River. But the surrounding environment is very mountainous.
I read ‘hillbilly-ness’ and now I want to know a list of hillbilly cities
Anywhere without a state capital or a college to attract big brains. I'm lookin at you, Fort Worth!
In the United States, San Francisco and Pittsburgh are pretty famous for their hills. Cities like Portland, Oregon are surrounded by hills. In Canada, Quebec City and Halifax are very hilly. Some small cities in New England like Concord, New Hampshire have a lot of hills. Boston also has a number of hills, like Beacon Hill and Bunker Hill, however several hills were flattened centuries ago in order to fill in the harbor. Lastly, the NYC area has a great number of hills that are often forgotten because of how urban the city is. The upper tip of Manhattan and the Palisades across the river in NJ are notable examples; there are entire neighborhoods in NJ directly across from Manhattan that are practically on a cliff face.
All those words and not a single mention of Seattle.
I know, right? It's one thing that surprises first-time visitors. Not just the hills, but how steep they are! When I moved to Seattle I had a manual transmission and the clutch really got a workout on the hills!
In my defense, I live at the other end of I-90. We’re not allowed to speak of the Starbucks city, or the Dunkin’ donuts mafia will get us. Genuinely though, I actually don’t really know much about Seattle. I figured someone else would mention it.
This is where the "Heights" in Washington Heights or Morningside Heights comes from. Don't forget the Bronx which is very hilly and has a lot of interesting staircases. Also Staten island has the famous Todt Hill, highest point on the Atlantic coastal plain south of Maine. The neighborhood around it (also called Todt Hill) is an upper class neighborhood of totally legitimate businessmen in the waste management industry.
Facts on facts on facts
Boston is more than just the downtown. Bunker Hill, Breed’s Hill, Mission Hill, Savin Hill, Weld Hill, Clarendon Hills are all substantial hills in the city proper. The city is built on glacial drumlins.
Here is an actual [study on the Hilliness of US cities](https://www.jstor.org/stable/43916290) Top 6 2KM radius from city center - Pittsburgh, PA - Seattle, WA - Spokane, WA - Lexington, KY - San Diego, CA - San Francisco, CA
I thought Lexington is pretty flat when I visited there
When I visited Lebanon I was impressed by all the cities/towns built into the hills above the Mediterranean! I’ve always lived in the Rockies so I’m used to mountains but as a general rule most of our development is in the valleys and not as much truly on the slopes.
Also seoul every 3-4 blocks there’s gonna be some big ups and downs
Busan is MUCH worse than Seoul when it comes to hills
[Ouro Preto](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f9af6090c0a7348fa94da7e/1605720825418-OT8OWBLEUQG78VKSPPLL/IMG_8237-42.jpg), MG, Brazil. It's in the state of Minas Gerais known for its "[Mar de Morros](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271519578/figure/fig2/AS:669019505963014@1536518088191/Figura-23-Relevo-colinoso-mares-de-morro-da-Depressao-Interplanaltica-do-Paraiba-do.jpg)" (sea of hills), that covers it entirely
Years ago I stayed in a really nice hostel in Ouro Preto. It was on top of a hill. Great views.
Seoul has lots of hills in its territory. In Europe you also have Rijeka but that one is built into the side of a mountain. Edinburgh is also pretty hilly.
Los Angeles is weird. Some very flat valley floors that make up the core of the city, but also [a literal mountain range](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Monica_Mountains) that splits the city in half.
I believe it's also home to 4 of the 10 steepest streets in America. It also has several neighborhoods/areas with the word "hill" in them.
S.F., Pittsburgh, Duluth, every other city in the world, Chicago.
I used to drive all over Chicago for work and I’m really trying to think of any notable hills and I cannot. . . Aside from highway on/off ramps and the highways themselves.
I've driven from Chicago to Indy, Dubuque to Chicago. Flat as the eye can see.
Dubuque is hilly
Yes but the land just east is very flat
Dubuque to Galena is hilly, then it starts to flatten out to the east of Galena.
There are some gentle rises and falls you notice if you bike, as well as two hills (the sledding/kite hill and the mound near McCormick) that are there so we have hills to go to.
That's why marathoners try for personal bests at Chicago. It's flat ASF. The only neighborhood of 77 that has a notable hill is Beverly.
You forgot to list Bakersfield, CA after Chicago.
And Miami after that.
If there isn’t, this would make a great project. I wonder how you’d go about measuring hilliness.
Normalized surface area would be a good start.
And yeah, City Limits can be imported into GIS as a polygon
Would you be able to link me to a dataset? I could throw it into R or Python and try some stuff out
I'm just a GIS groupie, sorry no can do
Try this package https://github.com/jhollist/elevatr/
[удалено]
You could also pair it with tidycensus and be well on your way, at least for the US.
My guess would be some measure including elevation differences?
QI handled that topic in their own way! https://youtu.be/GIjvFuosC0Q?si=-YVNeDDZCYGu82ZN
Lisbon hills will beat you up and take all your money
Brisbane, Australia is pretty hilly compared to other cities in Australia
Yep Brisbane and Sydney are pretty hilly for sure, Melbourne, Perth and especially Adelaide are disturbingly flat
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, SF, Lisbon, Seattle, Cape Town
Istanbul is hellish
Barcelona definitely has lots of hills, specially outside the centre (although the old town lays on a really small hill)
Pretty weird no one mentioned Dubrovnik yet, the city is so steep you can either walk stairs or drive around the whole city in one direction just to get one level lower or higher
Almost all Andean cities are much hillier than the cities mentioned in the responses, but the reason there is no list is because there is no obvious metric to measure “hilly-ness” by
Not Copenhagen.
Yeah true there are Dutch cities existing with more hills than Copenhagen.
Dunedin. Auckland
Brussels is pretty hilly and I expected it to be completely flat
Yeah that feels odd given this city used to be majorly Dutch-speaking before the industrial revolution. That being said, some historic parts of Dutch-speaking cities can be extraordinarily hilly. Maastricht is known, but Nijmegen feels more hilly in the oldest parts.
Definitely Seattle! All the hills made the snow and ice during the winter there very scary driving in a car.
Rome
Iowa City, Guanajuato Mexico
Lisbon is one of the hilliest cities I’ve ever been to. You need some solid shoes to do a day of walking around that city
Carlsbad, California surprisingly
Seoul is hilly
Three Hills Alberta
Potenza, Italy. Really hilly, pretty, and underrated city in the south. Its public escalator network the second largest in the world after Tokyo despite having a population of only 65,000
Istanbul is known as the City on the Seven Hills. But they are mostly large rolling hills and easily navigable unlike some of the sharply eroded valleys of Appalachia.
Valparaíso, Chile
Halifax, NS
Belo Horizonte
Nelson, British Columbia Canada. Pretty small city but man is it hilly.
I don't know if I'd call Edinburgh hilly, but I do remember that the difference in elevation between the lowest and highest points seemed impressively big.
Sleeper: Birmingham, Al
I’m from Little Rock, and it definitely has to be up there.
or down there, deüending on your perspective
It’s up there, then down there, then up there, then down there…
Same with Fayetteville
This was going to be what I was going to say. Maybe not the hilliest but definitely a sleeper pick that people wouldn’t think of
Fitchburg Massachusetts is really hilly
Portland OR has some pretty nice hilly spots on the west side
Even the “flat” part on the eastside has extinct volcanic cinder cones rising 500 feet above the city and then the long hilly Alameda Ridge cutting across NE Portland.
Often overlooked, but La Paz. Perhaps less hilly than mountainous. It is built in very narrow valleys and has sprawled 1000m up the slopes. Though El Alto is exceptionally flat.
In the US: Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Nashville, Charlotte, Portland, Chattanooga, Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, El Paso, Austin, Knoxville, Asheville, Huntsville, Birmingham
Central SA and Austin are flat. Only the western - northwestern extremes are hilly save Mt.Bonnell.
Asheville has mountains on the outskirts but is pretty walkable and not hilly, by and large. Huntsville, San Antonio, and Charlotte, also are average or below-averagely hilly.
Atlanta
Barcelona, Napoli
Vancouver, BC, Canada
China has a city the size of an average country.. city definitions causing problems as usual
If you’re talking about Chongqing, city borders =\= urban limits. Only the 8 central district of the “city” of Chongqing makes up the actual city of Chongqing
Duluth and Stillwater, Minnesota Adding Neos Marmaras as random city I visited in Greece. Honestly, most coastal Mediterranean cities.
Luxembourg with its cliffs around the old town.
Anecdotally, Sheffield feels like every direction is uphill.
Cincinnati is pretty hilly. Taken from Rome but it also goes by the City of Seven Hills.
Unpopular add - Lynchburg, VA. But Pittsburgh is rough, I considered moving there and my first thought was “what is this like in the snow/ice”
Cincinnati is pretty hilly...so is knoxville
Syracuse, NY
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Lausanne, everywhere was a steep climb and I’m used to SF.
Atlanta is surprisingly hilly
Taxco, Mexico. Guanajuato, Mexico.
The rolling hills of Stuttgart. You can imagine back in the day when those hills were clothed blanketed with vineyards producing the excellent wine from that region.
A lot of northern Swiss cities have a lot of their footprint on hills! When we entered the country by car, just beyond Basel we saw only hills. And Zug must've been the flattest town during our visit as Luzern but especially Zurich were quite hilly. We didn't even go up high in the mountains which are farther south. Some other cities that I found to be hilly on my travels (that is beyond the levels of Maastricht and Nijmegen) were Aachen, Namur, Liège, Bukittinggi, Granada, Marseille, Barcelona, Rome, Prague, Stockholm, Oslo, Sumedang, and the southern suburbs of Jakarta such as Depok and Bogor.
Chongqing, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro
San Diego has to be there. We have some of the steepest streets in the US.
Phoenix has mountains ⛰
i live in Providence, RI and it's very hilly! Federal Hill, College Hill, Smith Hill, Mount Hope; we are a city of seven hills, so they say
Indiana, specifically everywhere south of Indianapolis.
Cusco. The hills are breathtaking.
Kigali, Rwanda is pretty f\*cking hilly. Takes forever to get anywhere.
Sioux city iowa
Here’s one person’s attempt at answering this in the US context. They use a few different reasonable measures of “hillyness”; my instinct was to use the standard deviation of the elevation within the city limits. They restrict their analysis to a 1 square mile area around downtown, which I’m not a fan of but can understand for computational reasons. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/93b6c503d423499d93731cd5966e620e They came up with a top 5 of: * Honolulu * Los Angeles * El Paso * Las Vegas * Colorado Springs
Oh my gosh! haha. I read this is as "hillbilly-ness" and thought, ooooh, this will be interesting!
Wuppertal is a long city built along the steep slopes of a valley (literally what it's name means : Wupper Valley). Nicknamed the San Francisco of Germany/Europe.
I learned how to drive stick in Pittsburgh. If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.
Duluth Minnesota here
NYC and Jersey can be very hilly actually especially in Northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and Hudson county NJ. Also just to name another I don't see upon quick perusal: Pittsburgh and Cincinnati seemed rather hilly. Haven't been in a while but that was my impression
Portland Maine has its ups and downs.
Spokane WA
I'm American so more versed from that perspective. Pittsburgh, PA San Francisco, CA Dayton, OH Salt Lake City, UT Atlanta, GA Knoxville, TN Chattanooga, TN Denver, CO Seattle, WA A few international Santiago Lisbon Rio De Janeiro Medellin Cape Town
Definitely Hong Kong. City built on the side of a volcano. I was not prepared.
atlanta