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This is a follow-up to a conversation started in the "smallest global cities" thread.
What do you think is a better measurement of a city's overall size.
Urban area: The contiguous built-up area around a city
Metropolitan area: the "functional city", includes the main built-up area as well as exurban and rural areas with economic ties to the city (e.g. commuting, entertainment).
Definitely urban area. Rural areas just can't be used to define city's real size. They are too far away and too scattered to be part of fair measurment of city's overall size. Cointiguous built-up reflects city's size the best.
Definitely urban area. Rural areas just can't be used to define city's real size. They are too far away and too scattered to be part of fair measurment of city's overall size. Cointiguous built-up reflects city's size the best.
The metropolitan area for Gdansk is about 1.2 million while the urban area is about 800,000. Does 800,000 seem more right?
The metropolitan area for Gdansk is about 1.2 million while the urban area is about 800,000. Does 800,000 seem more right?
Absolutely. That would roughly be Gdansk,sopot,gdynia,rumia,reda,wejherowo all counted together.All cities. So all of them are cities situated next to each other with no clear borders. Without villages and rural areas. That definitely seems more right to me.
But I counted those 6 cities altogether and its about 900 000 but the point stays the same. Urban area is the right way to define how big the city is.
Last edited by WestPreussen; 10-28-2022 at 01:43 PM..
A contiguous urbanized area measure is cleaner in that it just looks at a core with its contiguously built up areas until they hit contiguous rural areas. At this point the city no longer feels like an urban environment.
That said, Metro areas which are larger and typically include rural areas, towns and cities that are not contiguous, but do have a connection to an anchor urban area. There are economic links, transportation links etc. Individuals from these smaller noncontiguous metro parts will often travel to the contiguous core urban area for work or school and add to its vibrancy. So I don't think all that should be discounted either when the links are strong.
So i'd say both measures need to be taken into account. There's also geography as well, some urbanized areas simply can't build up contiguously any longer due to mountains or protected green areas, so there needs to be more distant satellites. Should these be discounted from the anchor urban core entirely - not really especially as I said, if there are strong economic and transportation links.
It depends on what you're trying to measure. If you're going for comparisons of something like overall economic production and the like or trying to do something with planning and funding, then probably metropolitan area. If you're trying to talk about how walkable an area is or how expansive that walkable area is, then probably urban area.
I think the thing that gets confused here is that the "official" or semi-official criteria for either of those terms vary greatly from country to country so you get really confused people trying to use "Metropolitan" areas from one country being compared to the other when they aren't similarly defined. There are of course some attempts at doing apples to apples comparisons like Demographia. A lot of people don't seem to be very clear on that unfortunately.
One other note is that this is a US-based site and so people are more familiar with the US definitions, so I think that should be mentioned in particular. For the way the US Census Bureau works, the urban area definitions are pretty in line with that of many other countries and the basic units it's broken down into, the census tracts, are fine-grained enough that you can probably use that data to reasonably create apples to apples comparisons with other like census results. The US Census Metropolitan Statistical Area and Combined Statistical Areas though are based on the county-equivalent level and those can run a vast gamut in sizes from dozens of square kilometers to tens thousands of square kilometers and they aren't so much based on how settlement patterns actually work, but historical definitions of counties that are very much a product of their time, and in the US, has seldom been adjusted for the last century or so despite massive changes in technology, demographics, and settlement patterns as the county system is very much part of the US political system. As such, the Metropolitan Statistical Area of the US census bureau doesn't match the definition of metropolitan area given by the OP's post.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 11-01-2022 at 10:30 AM..
The Larger Urban Zone aka Functional Urban Area is probably the best way to measure metropolitan areas in Europe. Despite the name, it is actually a metropolitan measure instead of an agglomeration measure. It's basically the European equivalent to the Metropolitan Statistical Area used in the United States.
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