Abstract
Metropolitan areas play a crucial role on the economic performance of countries. They tend to concentrate important shares of the national population and economic activity, but also important shares of innovation, highly educated workers and infrastructures. The 90 largest metropolitan areas in OECD countries, for example, account for around 40 % of OECD population and almost 50 % of its economic activity (OECD 2011).
The opinions expressed and arguments employed here are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD. We are grateful to Konstantin Rosina for research assistance and suggestions, Lewis Dijkstra, Hugo Poelman and Tomas de Leus at the European Commission DG for Regional Policies and César de Diego Diez and Oliver Heiden at Eurostat for their contribution to the computations on European countries. Comments from Richard Baker, Rafael Boix Domènech, Mike Coombes and Joaquim Oliveira Martins are gratefully acknowledged.
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Notes
- 1.
Please see EU (2011a) “Cities of Tomorrow: challenges, visions and ways forward”; EU (2011b) “Territorial Agenda of the European Union 2020. Towards and Inclusive, Smart and Sustainable Europe of Diverse Regions”; HM Government (2011) “Unlocking growth in cities” and HIS Global Insight (2011) “U.S. Metro Economies”, Prepared for The United States Conference of Mayors and the Council for the New American City.
- 2.
The methodology has been applied in cooperation with the European Commission.
- 3.
- 4.
The only exception is Portugal, for which commuting data are available only for LAU1 regions.
- 5.
An example is the municipality of Aldea de Trujillo, a small rural town of 439 inhabitants in 2000 which has very high density because its communal territory measures only 0.3 km. See other examples by Gallego at http://www.ec-is.org/docs/F11116/RURAL%20URBAN%20%20POPDENS.PDF).
- 6.
Contiguity for high-density clusters does not include the diagonal (i.e. cells with only the corners touching). Gaps in the high-density cluster are filled using the majority rule iteratively. The majority rule means that if at least five out of the eight cells surrounding a cell belong to the same high-density cluster, the cell will be added. This is repeated until no more cells are added.
- 7.
The integration of different clusters of urbanized areas in a unique functional urban area considers only the information provided by travel-to-work data. In some countries, additional sources of information on functional linkages between different areas could be used to better identify polycentric patterns of development. For example, the Northern Way has used information on relative concentrations of employment by four-digit sector across neighboring urban centers to proxy sectoral business linkages, and thus the likelihood that different centers form part of the same economic area (The Northern Way 2009). In general different choices on how to measure the economic linkages economic among areas would of course result in different boundaries and size for the functional urban areas.
- 8.
For example, the application of the criterion leads to the pairing of 94 urban cores in 20 countries in Europe.
- 9.
Without the adjustment, a hinterland municipality with 14 % commuting to three tied urban cores (thus strongly integrated into the urban agglomeration, with 42 % (14 times 3) of its resident population moving to work to the urban centres), would be excluded from the metropolitan area.
- 10.
It must be noted that few functional urban areas spread over national borders.
- 11.
Contiguity for high-density clusters does not include the diagonal (i.e. cells with only the corners touching).
- 12.
Gaps in the high-density cluster are filled using the majority rule iteratively. The majority rule means that if at least five out of the eight cells surrounding a cell belong to the same high-density cluster it will be added. This is repeated until no more cells are added.
- 13.
Given that cities are identified on the basis of high-density clusters with minimum size of 50,000 people, there is a lower bound in the population of the functional urban areas. The smallest cities identified (Thousand and Palm Desert in the United States, Granollers in Spain) have a total population of around 45,000 people.
- 14.
Several studies confirm the important role that middle-size cities play in the national economic development. In fact, middle-size cities are often seen as a vehicle of diffusion of opportunities of growth and as a more sustainable form of urbanization, with lower footprints on the natural environment (Mayfield et al. 2005).
- 15.
These are Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Spain and the United States. The population in urban systems of these 14 countries represents around 80 % of the population in urban system of the 27 OECD countries included in this paper.
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Brezzi, M., Piacentini, M., Sanchez-Serra, D. (2012). Measuring Metropolitan Areas: A Comparative Approach in OECD Countries. In: Fernández Vázquez, E., Rubiera Morollón, F. (eds) Defining the Spatial Scale in Modern Regional Analysis. Advances in Spatial Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31994-5_4
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