Im talking about everthing above the grazed land excluding people. City is a bit undefined, appreciate advice on that. Got no idea about calculating it but tall buildings and lots of housing would be beneficial. Im guessing hong kong/tokyo but manhattan must be up there.
In absence of any more refined technique, I’d just pick the city with the highest population, guessing that the weight of everything in it is proportional to the number of people.
You also have to take relative wealth into account. A city like Sao Paulo, with people living in shantys, is going to weigh less (maybe, who knows) than New York City, with massive commercial buildings, and where even the poor people (except the homeless) live in some sort of masonry building.
I’d think you also have to take ammount of space, therefore amount of stuff, into consideration. Tokyo, with it’s small apartments, probably has less infrastructure per person, then a city with a lot of houses.
Houston and LA come to mind as physicaly huge cities with a lot of room for stuff per person, but it’s an interesting question if the larger size+lower denisty per square foot+ more stuff per person could beat the really dense urban centers.
This reminded me of something I read in Wikipedia some days ago:
To be honest I take that with a large, earthquake inducing size, grain of salt.