The Problem with how we Measure Cities...
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- Опубликовано: 30 май 2024
- The ways city populations are measured in the US and around the world are anything but straightforward, and can lead to some pretty different results. Tired of all the arguing over how big your city really is? Do you hear words like "metro area" and "city proper" get thrown around and want to finally understand what they mean? Lucky for you, I've made this primer on the three main methods for classifying urban settlement. After you're done watching, leave a comment and let me know which you prefer!
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Urban Area is the most accurate for modern times. If housing and commercial development continue on for miles then you haven’t left the urban area.
No because some cities have hills or water in the way between different areas.
I think you were meaning most accurate to america.
@@mlRitchie-uy4ci the chongqing example illustrates a similar issue, but in the opposite way, where most of the city proper is uninhabited or rural
For statistics I think urban area is most useful since everyone there probably travels, works, and shops in neighboring areas, but for describing vibe or lifestyle where you live, I think city proper is the most appropriate. Since individual municipalities can enforce their own specific laws/ordinances, and their own zoning laws that govern how the urban fabric is laid out and ultimately impacts how the local people to that municipality live.
Much of the northeast is a huge urban sprawl. How you differentiate Jersey City and New York City? Would you not?
By the city limits measure, Durham NC is a bigger city than St. Louis MO. By urban area, St. Louis is more than 5 times the size.
Yeah. Saint Louis is barely larger than Lubbock, Texas. Except it’s actually the size of San Antonio, Texas. But San Antonio is also 3.5 times the size of Saint Louis. And Lubbock has almost 70,000 more people.
I always go by Metro population because:
To a local, Saint Charles is NOT Saint Louis, but to literally everyone else - Eureka is. Hell, so is Saint Clair. 40+ fuckin’ miles out.
@@austingee238well to be fair historically, and geographically, Saint Charles IS a separate city from St. Louis and is Not apart of St. Louis.
@@austingee238ya st. Louis city and county are weird
Another St. Louisan here, I hate city proper measurements. Due to a number of reasons including some bad ones our city is pitifully small. Never met someone from Webster Groves or Ballwin who names their "city" to an out of towner. We all root for the Cardinals and hate Stan Kroenke regardless of borders lol.
My town had 412 people and was much bigger than Las Vegas.
I've always used the continuous built-up area as the definition of a city, whether for study purposes or for everyday life. It's the most tangible, you see it with your eyes: you're not in another city just because a sign says so. The city ends where the farm and the non-built land start.
How do you separate NYC and Jersey City?
according to your logic NYC and philly would be under 1 city then, doesn't make any sense.
@@rohitp4301 Jersey City is part of the NYC metropolitan area (and part of the BosWash megalopolis). It's basically a central neighborhood of NYC, being very close to lower Manhattan.
But my comment was about over 95% of cases, which involve villages, towns and cities that don't spread out endlessly in a giant conurbation.
@@byunbaekhyun2283 I am talking about scenarios in the US and the world, where there is a unipolar "traditional" agglomeration of buildings that ends clearly at the beginnig of the farmlands around it. Conurbations and megalopolises are a different thing altogether.
@@byunbaekhyun2283Correct. It is considered part of the North East Corridor Megalopolis
"When have you ever seen a ring of residential suburb development, with nothing in the center?" - I'm looking at you, Detroit.
To be fair when they were built there was actually something in the middle
Hey we coming up! The whole downtown one of the safest downtowns in the country and we just got that lil sign.
The center is building up. I’d say at this point there is a lot going on in the center of Detroit, a little less on the outside of the city proper, then a lot in most suburbs. Except Eastpointe. Eastpointe is… it’s Eastpointe
Here just to say that Detroit is definitely on the come up. I think part of this is the reindustralization of the country as a whole.
Detroit definitely has an urban core: in Windsor.
Growing up in SoCal it always felt so arbitrary since once you cross through the cajon pass, it almost becomes a continuous amalgamation of cities on top of cities until the ocean. The city limits all just butt up against each other.
As someone who grew up in the IE I completely agree.
@@miggypeso909Start in Ventura on the 101,head east, change to the 10 in downtown Los Angeles, and continue east and you don't really leave the urban area until Banning, 150 miles away.
@@Geotpf I’m in Redlands,which is the far eastern periphery of the LA metro. I don’t understand why we get separated from the LA metro at times considering how close we actually are,plus all our tv is LA based, the sheer amount of former Angelinos that have moved here,etc. We’re apart of it all.
Tijuana and San Diego also are a conurbation with a country border in the middle.
This is what I always say to my fellow Metro-Phoenix AZ friends. Meza, chandler, Tempe, Phoenix, scotsdale.. they're all phoenix to me 🤷♂️. Just different parts or areas.
Like you, I think that measuring the urban area is the most accurate gauge of measurement for a city's population. However, the city limits measurement also has great merit because it tracks what's happening with shifts in the role the city plays within its urban area. Very well done, Carter!
Thank you for the detailed coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area! I have been a resident here for my entire adult life, first on the Peninsula, and now in downtown San Jose. And I do indeed experience this as a single urban entity with three large urban cores. I find ALL three methods of defining cities unsatisfying because all of them break up the place where I live in ways that feel strange and alien to the place I live.
Lifelong resident of a suburb of Trenton, NJ here. I can't speak for Wilmington, DE, but to me it makes total sense that Trenton is it's own metropolitan area. Even through we're about 1/3 of the way from Philly to New York City and we're strongly influenced by both, we have our own history, culture and identity. Trenton is actually a huge employment hub with the state offices being located here, people commute into the city to work and then go home to the suburbs, there really isn't a ton of people commuting into philly or NYC every day the way they would from Camden, Jersey City, or Newark.
Similarly, Wilmington is the largest city in our state with a history quite distinct from Philadelphia. Our culture is uniquely Delawarean: a bit southern estuarine, a lot industrial northeast urbane. There isn't a lot of commuting to Philadelphia either, though we have the train (that said, I have heard many people say they commute to Wilmington from Philadelphia!)
Certainly can't deny the interconnectedness with Philadelphia and as much as I identify as a Delawarean I also identify as a Delaware Valley-an. But we are not Philadelphia, not even in the same state.
I often compare Wilmington to Camden and Chester, but I never thought to compare to Trenton. It is interesting to think about!
Wilmington is very much connected to Philly. We get our news from Philly, we get our media and tv stations from Philly. Wilmington is the younger brother of Philly and we are very much influenced by Philly
@@williammckelvey2677the last time I was in Wilmington, Delaware I couldn’t help but laugh because it was just like a mini version of Philly. Same style row homes, cheesesteaks and hoagies still being sold at the corner stores. People talk the same.
I’d say in the suburban state that is New Jersey, the inherent exclusion of Trenton in Philly’s MSA (but the inclusion of Wilmington, DE) is merely due to it being the capital of the State.
Wilmington would historically & distinctly matter more if it had stayed the capital of Delaware.
If New Jersey had its capital in Cape May, Atlantic City, Toms River or Vineland; Trenton would by now, be an industrial edge city/affordable suburb of Philadelphia, akin to Camden or Wilmington, DE.
It's because a lot of the east coast is now a megalopolis where it's just continuous urban sprawl from DC to Boston. I'm currently in the middle of Maryland and there are plenty of people around me who work in DC, or work in Baltimore, but also loads that work in the local area. There are also loads of people who live in either city who commute in to work in my local area. Does my area count as a DC suburb? A Baltimore suburb? Both or neither? Just one of those weird things.
I know you briefly touched on it, but: The issue with city limits and metro areas also extends further to demographic statistics, especially in the minds of laymen who don’t care to look further into them. I’ve been calling it the “Saint Louis paradox” since that city seems to exemplify it the most, but there are certainly other cities affected by it both in the St Louis way and the Anchorage way. St Louis proper is confined only to its most urban areas, and as such, any statistics done on it tend to reflect realities of the most urban areas of cities in general. That includes things such as income, race, and population density, but most namely (and most infamously) crime rates.
People often consider St Louis the most dangerous city in the US-and by city limits, sure, it’s pretty high up there. But analyzing cities by urban area definitions completely quell that fear and St Louis falls into being pretty average crime-wise-maybe a little higher than the median, but nothing out of the ordinary like the city-border stats seem to suggest. I remember it even drops below Houston and several others under this definition, which aren’t generally associated with high crime rates.
Very true. And such statistics often only serve to further exacerbate the problems these cities face with growing or sustaining their populations. St Louis proper used to have 856,000 people. Now they're down to 280K and still falling fast all thanks to the stigma associated with living within the city limits, and this trend won't stop until St Louis is able to use statistics that include, at the very least, all those countless unincorporated areas that surround the city that resist both annexation and self-incorporation. After all, the people living in those areas still say they're from "St Louis" (when it's convenient) and they don't have have a mayor or city council of their own, so why shouldn't they be counted statistically?
@kenaitchison7712 the incorporated areas, by definition, have a city council and mayor and often times their own police and fire departments. They are a city through and through.
@@PAYTONLB999 It was a typo. It should have read "all those 𝘂𝗻incorporated areas"
The fact that Jacksonville is Florida's largest city by population and the fact that the Bay Area's largest city is San Jose is why I've always referred to these "cities" as America's largest suburbs.
jacksonville is only that big is because it consolidated itself with its respective county
Ha. OK about San Jose, but what is Jacksonville a suburb of?
@@davidnacey7281 I think he's more saying that much of what is considered Jacksonville to other cities would be considered a suburb. I don't think many people in Florida (I lived there myself for 6 years) really think that Jacksonville is the biggest city in Florida. Miami definitely takes that cake even if some numbers beg to differ. Jacksonville is similar to Orlando where the cities have a small downtown, but most of the city is just a massive sprawl of single family homes. If most of the housing is single family homes and not apartment buildings or the sort, it's more suburban in nature than it is urban.
Behold, America's least known town that should be declared a city just because others are: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempstead,_New_York
I'm from Utah and I was fixing to comment on Ogden and Provo if you didn't. The funny thing is, up until watching this video, I had urban area and metro area flipped in my brain. I thought that metro would be the cities immediately adjacent to the main core, and urban area would be something larger. But your definitions make more sense. I would consider Ogden and Provo part of the same urban area as SLC, even though both are distinctly different in many ways.
Some even call it a megalopolis, albeit a small one compared to the Front Range in Colorado or especially the South Florida megalopolis.
Its a hard call. On the side of not considering them the same is the physical barriers: A mountain pass cuts off Provo and SLC from each other and there are something like two roads that cross it. The whole metro area is extremely long and thin... but geography forces that.
@@derrickthewhite1 It definitely is a harder call. Fortunately one of those roads going over the point of the mountain is a freeway though. I can imagine in the past it was an all day trip to get between Provo and Salt Lake City, and somewhat shorter to go between Salt Lake City and Orem, especially during the early automobile years around 1915 when the highway road known as the Arrowhead Trail wasn't largely paved yet.
Some of the oddities in how metropolitan areas are classified are due to where people actually work. For example, the Inland Empire depends on its proximity to LA, but not enough people who live there actually commute to LA County. There are a lot of warehouse and logistics jobs in the Inland Empire, and going into LA means driving a long distance through heavy traffic.
In cases where a city can't expand it's footprint because it's surrounded by other incorporated cities, they have problems increasing their tax revenue. That problem is made worse by people moving beyond the city limits and taking their tax money with them leaving it without the ability to provide it's residents with services. It turns into a downward spiral.
They can always ruin old slums and build sky-scrapers instead...
the vast majority of american cities have plenty of room to redensify, even with very simple changes to the law, like now outlawing accessory dwelling units, or front yard businesses (2nd thing use to be everywhere!) so many of the problems with our cities stem from the politicians making it illegal to make things better, single family zoning should be outlawed nationwide.
@@fluffbuck3t While you are correct in concept, and I agree those things should not be illegal, accessory dwelling units and front yard businesses are hardly the cause of a lack of density. The problem here is zoning, priority, and other unnecessary regulations. We need to ditch the idea of exact zoning, and instead limit zoning merely to industrial uses and non-industrial uses. Secondly we need to not be afraid of gentrification or changing the character of a neighborhood. Just don't use eminent domain. Finally get rid of all of the unnecessary regulations especially land use regulations (i.e. parking minimums or front yardage minimums).
I like smaller city limits for one reason. It gives the voters more control over their specific area. Suburbanites don’t steamroll over everyone else because the city is so large it encompasses a ton of low density land.
Shouldn’t less ppl reduce the amount of money the city needs?
Additionally, dense urban areas can charge more in sales and entertainment tax which allows them to collect taxes from ppl who don’t live there.
If large cities are failing to deliver the services their citizens are paying for it’s likely a political problem not a math problem. There’s more than enough funds available.
Great video. Being from Ohio, I can really relate. According to the first method, Columbus is by far our largest city. But the Cleveland and Cincinnati regions are larger. Like San Jose, Columbus has grown mainly by annexation. Cleveland and Cincinnati, on the other hand, have tiny city propers.
The Columbus metro is actually a lot more populated than I thought, sitting at around 2.1 million. Cincinnati is as 2.5 million and Cleveland has about 2.06 million
Ohio is already a bit unique in my opinion because there are 3 cities whose Urban and/or Metro areas are roughly the same size. With the exception of Texas and California who have multiple massive cities, I can't think of another state that is set up like this. Most states have 1 notably bigger city with numerous smaller but still significant cities. Even looking at states similar in size or location to Ohio: Indiana has Indianapolis and then smaller cities like Gary and Fort Wayne. Georgia has Atlanta and then Savannah and Macon. North Carolina has Charlotte and then Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Asheville. Pennsylvania has Philly and then Pittsburgh and Allentown. But Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati are all essentially equal in size when comparing their Urban/Metro areas. It just seems like a strange phenomenon that Ohio doesn't have that one super big city that is far and away larger than all the others. The only other situations I can think of are Dallas and Houston in Texas and San Diego and San Francisco in California, and they each have just the 2 similarly sized cities. Are there any other states that have 3+ cities that are equally sized and significant like Ohio and aren't "outshined" by a single notably larger city in that state. Even my California example isn't great since LA is far larger than San Diego and San Francisco.
@@mr.munger Interesting! The only other state I can think of is Florida, with Miami, Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando.
@@PhilipGermani Florida is another one where I think you can make the argument just because it's a massively populated state like California and Texas, but I still don't think it's a great example. Following the advice of the video and using Urban areas as the "best metric" Miami is the 4 largest urban area in the country with just over 6 million people and Tampa, the next largest Florida urban area, is 17th largest with 2.8 million. It's not even half the size of Miami. Orlando is 26th largest with 1.9 million. Meanwhile Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus rank 31, 33, and 35 with 1.7mil, 1.7 mil, and 1.6mil people each. They are damn near identical.
@@mr.munger But there is also Jacksonville, so Florida actually has 4 big metros, while Ohio only has 3.
I think a good example of the random rural counties in included in the metro area is Mille Lacs County in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. As someone from that area, it's cabin country and not closely linked at all to the Twin Cities. Its only included because one town is somewhat close to an actually built up area, but the rest of Mille Lacs County is the boonies.
For chicago, I've always found it so weird and arbitrary that they make a chunk of the northwest suburbs like McHenry and Round Lake Beach their own thing, they're really no different from any other suburb at similar distances from the urban core. It just feels so arbitrary. Despite that however, urban areas are still definitely the best way to measure a city
Yeah. There is a similar situation with Atlanta's and Dallas's exurbs as well.
@@elli6220 I don't doubt that. It feels so weird as a local that these random suburbs are their own thing yet some other places with their own downtown and history like Aurora aren't. Like Aurora was a large city of it's own until suburbs just kinda filled in the space between it and chicago, so it became a suburb. If you're gonna consider Aurora a chicago suburb, then Mchenry and Round Lake Beach should be too
Similar issue with Fairfield County, which is considered a separate metro from NYC despite much of dynamics of Fairfield being tied to New York
@@flamethefurry3516 I absolutely agree with you, especially since Chicagoland (Chicago’s Metro area) has the four most populous municipalities in the state of Illinois (Chicago, Aurora, Joliet, Naperville;) with Rockford, the 5th, being the only one in its own metropolitan area.
McHenry County is certainly not counted as a part of Rockford’s MSA.
Now that is interesting...
Perth, Western Australia has a City proper size of around 30 thousand but 2.6 million in the greater Perth -Peel area.
Australia always includes suburbs in their city populations. Their city centres don't have huge populations and are mainly office and commercial buildings, Almost everyone lives in the suburbs.
@@annanz0118 Also, the word "suburb" has a different definition in Australia. A suburb there simply refers to a named subdivision of a metropolitan area (think of a large neighbourhood). This means that even the CBD (downtown area) is considered a suburb. Perth is divided up into 30 different government councils or LGAs (local government areas) and each of them govern either whole or parts of the 350+ suburbs. The word "city" in Australia also has 3 potential meanings. 1) The metropolitan area, 2) the LGA that is mostly urban, or 3) the inner part of the metropolitan area. If someone asks what city I live in, I'd say "Perth" but that's referring to the metropolitan area. If my friend said "I'm heading into the city later" he's probably referring to the centre of the metropolitan area or the CBD & periphery. If I said I live in the City of Bayswater it just means I live in a suburb that's governed by the council called "City of Bayswater" based in Perth.
I do posts on Mesoamerica (Aztec, Maya etc) & work with history/archeology channels on the topic: I really wish there was standardized definitions of urban areas in Mesoamerican archeology! Mesoamerican cities are usually laid out like this: There's an urban core (or epicenter, or some other terms, not all researchers use the same ones or use them to mean the same things!) composed of temples, palaces, ball courts, and other elite, monumental architecture organized around large open plazas, their layout being arranged for ritualistic alignment or communal flow, viewing, activities, etc. Around this core, you then have less-planned suburbs where commoner homes (often organized into patio groups, with 2-4 homes organized around a small central plaza or patio) were scattered across/interspersed with agricultural land (though sometimes with smaller mini cores and developed infrastructure like palisades for Maya cities, and aqueducts/drainage systems across the suburbs: the cores often had complex waterworks too), and radiate out with gradual decreasing density, without a clear distinction between where the city ends, or where another adjacent city or rural town/hamlet might begin.
Larger Maya cities take this to the extreme: Their suburbs can cover hundreds of square kilometers and can bleed into or connect the suburbs radiating out from other major cities: Tikal and the nearby cities of Zotz and Uaxactun are good examples of this: Almost the entire LIDAR scanning area around each city is filled by suburbs which bleed into the directly adjacent LIDAR zones/plots for the other two cities, if you look at tables from Canuto et al. Scince 361, 1355 (2018). Something like Copan, to my knowledge, doesn't really connect to other major cities's sprawls, but but essentially the entire valley it occupies, again, hundreds of square kilometers, could arguably be a series of dispersed towns and villages, or just the suburban and then rural sprawl out of Copan's core (though the research team(s) mapping Copan actually use the term "core" to refer to a lot of the primary suburban or periurban commoner homes/agricultural land in addition to actual monumental core they surround, not as I used the term above!)
This makes defining city limits and population sizes sort of a nightmare, as I'm sure you can relate to given your video here! The core of a site might have a few thousand or low tens of thousands of people, but if you include the suburbs, then that can jump to tens or hundreds of thousands.
To be clear, not all Mesoamerican cities follow this pattern: in fact, some of the most famous ones like Palenque, Teotihuacan, and Tenochtitlan don't: Palenque was located on a relatively narrow flat area on an otherwise steep hill/mountain, so the commoner homes are packed tight on residential terraces right alongside and among the urban cores and monumental structures. Teotihuacan was organized around a single central large road (the famous Avenue of the Dead), which was surrounded by a huge ~20sqkm grid of almost entirely palace compounds and temples, with even commoners living in luxury, and then a relatively smaller perimeter of suburbs. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was founded on an island in the middle of a lake which subsequently was expanded via grids of artificial islands which also acted as hydroponic farms, and venice like canals left between them. The center of the city was a large contained plaza/precinct with temples and other structures, which was surrounded by a semi-grid based series of palaces and temples adjacent to the walled precinct, and some orthogonal roads (Tenochtitlan specifically took some urban design influences from Teotihuacan: The Aztec also adopted a sort of Teotihuacano revival style to murals and some ceramics and even did excavations at Teotihuacan's ruins!) diving the city into quadrants, but the further out you went into the artificial islands, the more suburban it would be with commoner homes among the farms till there's a clear perimeter where the city had yet to expand past (though, it did fuse into some other cities on adjacent islands due to those artificial plots!). There are other exceptions, like Tlaxcala, Angamuco, Tututepec, etc, but
However, even with cities where there is a more obvious delineation between the core/suburbs and surronding towns, that doesn't mean calculating population is still straightfoward: What about political/state boundaries? Some researchers and papers total up the population for city-states or kingdoms, which can also include nearby cities or towns within a primary urban center's direct local influence, but aren't connected to that primary's site suburbs and are still clearly separate settlements (or maybe some DO bleed into the primary site's suburbs, but some don''t!)
If you're interested in detailed site or LIDAR maps or artistic reconstructions of any of this, let me know and we can get in touch! I have quite a lot and
“When have you ever seen a ring of residential suburban developments with nothing in the center?”
Jacksonville, North Carolina
one thing I think you missed was the concept of consolidated city-counties (look at places like nashville, augusta, macon, columbus, jacksonville, saint louis, baltimore)
You have a great genuine perspective and I appreciate you
Thank you! The fact that the inland empire isn’t counted in LA’s metro nor urban area has been bugging me for years. Happy to hear I’m not the only one.
Interestingly, in some European countries like Germany the city limits look more like the ones in Texas despite the historic character of many suburbs.
Might be in part due to the fact that local opposition to being annexed into the neighboring large city is either not as strong as in the US. Also, if there is resistance it's often ignored and suburbs lose their status as independent cities whether they want to or not.
There's costs and benefits to each, and how people weigh joint planning and joining utilities versus perceived voice in local government definitely changes with time and place.
@@rianfelis3156 It can be summed up as the following: "I moved to the suburbs for peace and quiet and to get away from blacks. Don't spend the tax dollars I pay to live in the suburb on the blacks in the city I fled from, or I will sell and move even farther away."
the thing you’re missing about metro areas is that they provide way better economic data than urban or city proper can. take Midland Texas if you were just to take urban area you would miss the vast oil wells the made it have the highest personal income per capita in 2022. That’s also why San Francisco and San Jose are separate urban areas. San Jose’s economy is vastly more reliant on tech than San Francisco more diverse economy and the cost of key goods varies wildly between the 2. The use of metropolitan areas should not be restricted just the number of people living in it.
Ummmmmm… No. As someone who actually lives in the Bay Area, tech dominates both SF, San Jose and the rest of the Bay. Pretty much the entire area has the exact same insane housing prices and cost of living. We have a unified transit system and the highways are the same everywhere with the same crazy traffic.
As an actual resident it’s virtually impossible for me to understand why out-of-towners decided that my work friends who live in Fremont live in a different metro area from my colleagues who live in Milpitas, while we all commute to SF and/or Santa Clara for work at our two offices.
So what'll it be - city proper, metro area, or urban area? Let me know in the comments below! Also, I've been traveling around the country filming for the last 2 months and I've got a lot of cool projects on the lineup. A lot (though not all) of the photos and footage in this video are photos or videos that I took myself! Hope you all enjoy!
There is really no right or wrong answer here in terms of actually economic gravitas of a city but from your explanation I think you're right to use urban areas. I'm from the UK but a while back I was working on integrating US data into a product that was basically sold to companies and organisations to report on demographics and economic data and help companies either understand their customers for existing retail locations or potential opportunities as to where to expand into new markets and where would be best to locate.
Being a UK based company I'd previously worked on the UK product (as well as the same system for other European countries, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Romania), and there are issues with defining cities here in the UK, basically because the levels of geography in the hierarchy are either postal or parliamentary, neither of these is great to define an urban area and they don't talk nicely to each other either, but that's another story. Manchester could be considered the second biggest city in England if you include all the separate mill town like Bolton, Oldham, Bury, Rochdale, and even Wigan (which in my opinion isn't Manchester), but if you are just talking about the city itself it's it bigger than Sheffield (it probably is now, but I remember having this argument 10-15 years ago)? Most of our issues I put down to history and sometimes snobbery or oneupmanship (a fairly wealthy suburb not wanting to call itself part of a bigger city despite being physically joined).
When I started looking at the US geography, or maybe should I say government statistical geographical areas that gets reported on and you can accumulate the data up to get higher level geographies I was just left scratching my head. Your example of the Bay Area I thought would be simple, in my mind I always see SF and Oakland as different cities, I guess you could include SF and SJ, but in my mind these are 3 different cities. I think you are right that continuous urban areas means one city, although when I was watching your video the whole NE megalopolis might be considered one city if you strictly went by this definition, so there's still nuance to be had.
It would be great, if at sometime you had the time (and inclination) you could have a look at the UK with this question in mind. Obviously there's London (which I believe is the only capital city to contain 2 cities, the City of London, the original Roman walled city, and the City of Westminster which was originally a religious centre and now is where our parliament sits), but there are other what you might call urban areas like Greater Manchester, the West Midlands (Birmingham, Wolverhampton), Merseyside (Liverpool), Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, the East Midlands (Nottingham, Derby, and Leicester), Newcastle upon Tyne-Sunderland-Gateshead, and even Stoke on Trent (known as the Potteries because of it being home to where fine china was first made here during the industrial revolution, made up of 5-6 towns that were separate entities at once point), and obviously not it Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, Cardiff in Wales, and Belfast in Northern Ireland.
London especially has commuter towns separated by countryside from the urban area as well as its suburbs that are part of it (actually thinking about it Birmingham, Manchester, and many other cities do have this as well), but usually here a city has governance over its suburbs, whereas in the US you often see them in different counties with completely different agendas to the city itself, one place i know this is the case it's Atlanta, split between several counties, I don't see how that works at all, some might say it doesn't, some will obviously like it that way.
Anyway, great video, just a thought for a future video (though it might be a while, maybe after you've finished the 52 US States), I just thought it might be interesting to you and US viewers (many who might watch our Premier League and have an interest).
You mentioned how K.C. is only the biggest city proper in Missouri but failed to elaborate much on how underestimated St. Louis is because of this metric. :/
Urban areas have never made sense to me because they have often excluded a lot of suburbs. I live in DFW and it makes no sense ten years ago and even today that Denton is a separate urban area from Dallas. Urban Arge Agglomerations have always made more sense to me.
are you gonna pin this?
city proper ofc. it doesn't make any sense to compound NYC with philly and other4 cities around it just because they're in a close proximity (by the standard of southern and western US cities).
In my opinion, the best measure of a population for a city would be a metropolitan area that is measured by including outlying populations that are somehow dependent on the core city (not on just the surrounding counties) in any way. If you need to visit the core city relatively often for any reason or depend on any services provided from the core city or it’s corporations that are stationed there, then you’re part of it’s metro area. Generally speaking, this means that any location within 30 to 40 minutes of driving from the downtown area of a city makes it part of the metropolitan area because that’s the maximum amount of time people typically are willing to take to commute to the city.
So what about places where you don't need to go to the core ?
Suchas with DC and its surrounding areas made up of Arlington County, Alexandria City and Fairfax County Virginia and Montgomery County and Prince Georges County Maryland they are not apart of the same states and thus you may never need to go into DC for any reason. Plus Fairfax County could function without DC due to its large Airport Dulles with Shipping Hubs for UPS and Fedex, Data Centers for 1000's of Fortune 500 companies and Alexandria was a medium city before DC existed and would probably have grown larger if not for DC being created ?
NYC-Newark-Jersey City and surrounding areas same as with DC different states.
San Diego California and Tijuana Mexico ?
McAllen Texas and Reynosa, Mexico ?
What about places suchas Washington DC and Baltimore or Annapolis Maryland ? You can get from downtown DC to downtown Baltimore or Annapolis in 40 minutes .
@@Kev4Kev
Like I said, it’s not about just traveling to the core, it’s about depending on them in some way. Even something as simple as your local news station being based in the core city probably makes you part of that metro area in my opinion. With most of your examples, yes I would still consider them separate metro areas then using my definition, making DCs metro area probably much smaller than is thought. Now, you bring up a good concern with cities that are about 30 to 40 minutes within each other like Baltimore and DC. Funnily enough, I also live exactly 30 minutes between 2 other relatively big cities. I would say that using my definition, it’s pretty fluid. Like we used to be more dependent on one city, but now we have become more dependent on the other city as my family have gotten different jobs that are from the 2 different metro areas over time, therefore changing our metro area arguably from the first city to the second city.
You’re covering pretty wildly different, and often disconnected, areas by doing that though. The city isn’t going to have much in common with the exurbs and rural towns that are part of its metro area.
@@thedapperdolphin1590
But it’s not disconnected, that’s the point. It doesn’t matter if it’s rural or not.
I'm glad you're using the term city proper. I'm not sure if I'm the only one who suggested that on your Missouri video, but I know you saw my comment and took my suggestion to heart. Thanks. I also use the term in another way, you can say things like "While Des Moines proper is just over 200,000, it's metro area is close to three quarters of a million". I don't always use "city proper" when discussing these things, sometimes I use "*insert city* proper". Really good video that points out a lot of things I've noticed when studying the US.
Thank you for posting. I live in Worcester MA, incessantly brags about being the "second biggest city in New England" yet feels much closer to a Lowell, Manchester or Waterbury than a Providence, Hartford or New Haven.
Great video, I usually find myself switching between Urban Area and Metropolitan, although it usually depends on the list and specific cities suddenly being mentioned or not and based on the list decide which one i find more reasonable. Urban area is generally best best when as you mentioned it starts splitting up a singular urban region you get problems and cities left out. While metro population might not be as accurate, it does manage to generally accommodate all cities.
what i find especially interesting are polycentric urban areas like the Rhein Ruhr area. A video about that would be cool
This is a very good video with some great points! Glad I found your channel as a result!
Since quite a bit of this video featured Miami, it’s worth noting that Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach are not suburbs. They ate secondary cores that both play a significant role in that urban population. It’s also worth noting that West Palm is a totally separate TV media market.
i’d say it’s best to combine the populations of all the urban areas in a metropolitan region, to find the urban population of a city region, especially when undevelopable terrain separates cities from their suburbs. say by combining the san francisco-oakland, san jose, concord, antioch, livermore-pleasanton-dublin, & vallejo urban areas to get a population of 6,633,680 for the san francisco urban region.
This is why I would include The Woodlands urban area and maybe even Galveston as part as the Houston area
Though you would also get some frankly insane numbers with the Northeast metroplex stretching from DC all the way to Boston
yeah, though based con commute patterns and transport links within the NE megalopolis, i wouldn’t treat it as a single city. i think a separate DC-baltimore, philly-wilmington-trenton, NY-new haven-poughkeepsie, hartford-springfield, and boston-providence-worcester would be how i’d divide it, though yes my method does have to get quite subjective when cities get close together.
CSA population combines all the cities and suburbs of an urban region together. It solves the issues you mentioned in the Bay Area and Los Angeles regions.
The northeast corridor is so dense and continuously populated, you can consider Boswash, Boston to Washington DC as a single mega city. That means 1/6 of the US population lives in one mega city. It would surpass California and Texas in population and economic output. Dividing it is somewhat arbitrary.
Are you from that area, I am stop the 🧢. Their is definitely rural space in pockets from DC/B-More to Boston.
@@neox9369 yes I’m from the area. There is no rural area along the i95/ northeast corridor. I have traveled along nearly every interstate highway in the contiguous 48 states. At best you get some suburbs or parks, but there’s no rural land.
Try driving through corn fields for 5 hours straight in Kansas if you want to see what is actually rural, cuz the i95 / Acela corridor is not it.
Same thing in Canada: Ottawa and Halifax city limits encompass not only all of its suburbs but large swaths of rural areas, while Vancouver's city limits cover a very small portion of the Metro area. Calgary also encompasses all of its suburbs but few rural areas.
Well said Carter, agreed that urban area is the optimal way to measure relative size, fascinating discussion and graphics.
Found your channel today, Carter - I won the Indiana geography bee in elementary school and I love this stuff - please keep up the great work!
I grew up in Durham and there's definitely a less urban buffer between it and Raleigh; less so between Durham and Chapel Hill. The three are talked of as equal cores of "the Triangle" socially, despite being significantly different in size.
This has always been a topic that has interested me. I love looking at how city proper compares to the urban area where some cities have a lot more people living in the suburbs. My favorite example being my hometown of St. Louis where there are less than 300,000 within the city itself but well over 2 million in the area surrounding.
Very interesting topic. I've sometimes thought about how these different comparisons skew our perceptions about places.
Personally, I'd still prefer the metropolitan area as a base for comparison, because imo that shows best what's functionally together. Although to consider counties as the smallest unit is kind of wild, and I understand your point about it. (Even if other countries don't do it that way.)
Another thing: I wish we just stopped using the term 'suburb'. At this point it's so vague, it can basically mean whatever you want.
San Diego has over 1 million people. However, its boundaries extend almost 60 miles from Mexico to Escondido CA. Communities like San Ysidro and La Jolla do not legally exist.
I live in Grand Forks. Was not expecting to be mentioned lol
This video is great. Very good analysis of each of these metrics.
not only in America, depending on what system you use Brussels or Antwerp is the largest city of Belgium.... or maybe even Charleroi as it is laying much farther away from any other similar sized town.
Carter, A lot of hard work. Great and inormative video VERY well presented.
Great video as always! Although I was expecting you to mention the Demographia Word Urban Area report. Those guys have been tracking Urban Areas across the globe on an annual basis for exactly those same reasons, making possible to compare cities (or I should say Urban Areas) in a more standardized way.
Personally I prefer metro area. The question I always ask is can you make a trip to the city in less than a day, and what major population center do you go to if you need to access a hyper specialized service.
If you need to travel more than a day(even a long one) it feels hard for a city to hold sway. Often you need to go into the city to access hyper specialized services or goods that only make economic sense to offer to a very large population.
The easy way to tell is what you would say if you're talking to a forgnier or the geographically inept you say, " I'm from [home town] its near[major city]"
That definition doesn't really work where I live. My town (Rexburg, Idaho) is technically it's own micropolitan area, but is in 3 cities' spheres of influence, Idaho Falls, Salt Lake City, and Boise, the latter 2 of which are both at least 4 hours away. I wouldn't say I'm "near" Salt Lake City or Boise. A day's trip away, yes, near, no.
I am not receiving the notifications. 😕 I didn't know you had a new release. Am watching now!
Glad you're here, Carter.
A lot of effort went into this video. Very well done.
I’m interested to know what you think of CSAs. Combined Statistical Areas are an attempt at recognizing how several larger, initially smaller separate cities can grow together to form one urban conglomeration, and therefore classifying them as a single entity. In this case for example, even though San Francisco-Oakland, and San Jose are separate URBAN areas, all three together form the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose Combined Statistical Area.
Thank you for elucidating upon this topic. I frequently when talking with friends am adamant that we compare metro populations rather than city-proper populations. Thank you for introducing me to urban area populations, which (despite their flaws) seem more accurate.
Just a side note. You frequently refer to "city propers." I believe the plural should be "cities proper."
Thanks for showing Grand Forks. I have never heard a RUclipsr talk about my hometown!
Sometimes, suburban cities might be physically separated from the core urban area due to political or economic reasons. Maricopa (confusingly, not in Maricopa County) is essentially a suburb of Phoenix, especially with how often highway 347 gets traffic, but it cannot be closer to Phoenix because a tribal reservation is in the way. However, in the case of Goodyear, it’s probably more so that the area only started getting developed recently. A decade ago, the intersection of Bullard Ave/Van Buren St, which is close to where the city was first founded, was empty, while nowadays, the area is still half-empty. The far west valley still has a bunch of undeveloped/agricultural land surrounded by or surrounding newer suburban developments.
This is an excellent video
One can argue that Greater Miami is yet even larger. The urbanization stretches to Jupiter in in northern Palm Beach County. One only has to drive the Turnpike or I-95 to see that the urban area is so large it spans television markets.
Good insights. I've never really considered how population of cities was determined.
I find it interesting how our descriptions of communities evolve over time, much like the communities themselves. I do prefer using the census as it simplifies things, defining areas as either rural as open country and having less than 5k resident or urban being denser developer with more than 5k residents.
This was an interesting watch!
I feel like Miami is not the capital of Latin America, Mexico City or any of the massive Latin American capitols seems like a more appropriate designee.
Part of the delineation for metro areas, and, subsequently, urban areas, is commuting patterns. A metro area has a central urban area with at least 50k people and connecting counties with at least 25% of their workers commuting to the county or counties containing the central urban area.
Speaking to the Bay Area, about 20% of Santa Clara County residents work in a San Fran Oakland metro County. Something like 70% work in Santa Clara. That's a higher portion working in same county than San Fran itself. Commuting wise, it's distinct.
Maybe a good way to incorporate the effect of commuters would be to look at the workplaces instead of the residents. That way the "population" figure will automatically include commuters, even if the limits of the city or census area are not quite optimally drawn.
One problem would be how to count people who don't work, like children, retired, or housewives/husbands. Count them where they live? Add them to the employed member of their household (or if there's more than one employed, add the unemployed to all employed in proportion)? And a smaller but still significant issue might be service workers who may still commute into the city to render their services. (I'm mainly thinking of self-employed here, but a surprisingly large fraction of companies may fit this description too.)
Another problem would be that you still have to decide how to draw the boundary. City limits suffer from the differing political situations; while the "urban area" might sprawl out so much that you catch multiple major commuting destinations in the same area.
On a more serious note, I fully agree with your case of using urban area, or even metro area. Both are more useful in terms of describing areas of influence.
well i can only talk from a German view. and here everything is part of a border until the last corner. the smallest entity is a settlement. this usually gets administered by a village, and a village can be either a independent entity within a county or be a part of municipality. the county is usually a part of a state and the 16 states make up Germany. there are some extention to it. Germany has 3 city-states on a state-level. They are Hamburg, Bremen (which are technically 2 cities) and Berlin. Lets take ur 3 approaches for the biggest cities in Germany: 1st Berlin at 3.7 mio., 2nd Hamburg at about 2 mio., 3rd Munich at 1.5 mio. and 4 Cologne at 1 mio. Next would follow Frankfurt at 700k, Stuttgart at 630k, Duesseldorf at 629k , Leipzig at 616k, Dortmund at 593k and Essen at 583k. That are the the population if u just look at city limits. Now to the tricky part why urban Area would make it hard there. the Metropolitan Area is a fixed agglomation constant that puts Rhine-Ruhr at the first with 6 mio., but that includes alone 2 of the 10 biggest cities: Dortmund and Essen and various other big cities over 300k. Followed by Cologne-Duesseldorf with 5 mio. again two of the biggest cities. And after that the Agglomation of Berlin-Brandenburg at 4.7 mio. this are 2 Entire states with Berlin at its urban core and various very rural counties. To make matters worse the urban area in the Ruhr-Valley is suppassing often the 5k so alone there would be around 50 independent cities that end up considered as one with around 27mio. people in the broader region. and where does it end, does it end at the Border to the Benelux or can that be considered part of it too? the same happens with the Rhine-Main Region around Frankfurt. Upto 50 cities again who are all big urban centres on its own. For example in Rhine-Main would be Mannheim at 315k, Heilbronn at 127k and Offenbach at 137k. But when u look at other cities in Europe, the city limits dont show the hole picture for example Paris usually is considered the hole Ile-de-France, London is usually the hole Greater London Area, or Madrid with his Independent Municapility of Madrid. And if u would ask anyone in the cities of Potsdam, Oranienburg or Falkensee, if they see themself as a Part of Berlin they would fight to death to make sure that picture doesnt appear. I guess my point im trying to make is that in a world of endless suburban sprawl it may seem logical to look at cities in an urban area, but in heavily urbanised countries the entity of a city might get suddenly lost.
I.E. New Jersey being the most densely populated state while its largest city is under 300k.
States like New Jersey and Pennsylvania suffer from municipal fragmentation, in other words too many damn towns and you can barely tell where one ends and another starts. It also is more costly to taxpayers to have so many small governing bodies. In PA it turns townships and suburbs into their own little fiefdoms and makes wealth inequality worse.
I think Newark at this point has a population a tad above 300k.
Urbanized area 🙏🏽🙌🏽
You know, when played at 2 times speed your narrations sounds pretty professional
Gteat video btw
Great video.
What if you combined all three in some way? Like an average between proper, metro, and urban?
ZIP codes are used as a way to measure populations, income level, etc. Also, think about "media markets" . A very interesting video.
i love thinking about stuff like this
Interesting note about metropolitan areas. In New England, due to the irrelevancy of the county as a level of government and dominance of the city and town, there is a separate metropolitan area measurement used, based on town borders, called the New England City and Town Area (NECTA), which provides a more accurate breakdown of the metropolitan areas (metropolitan NECTAs) inside New England.
Ya I think I commented on the vid you referred too on the baton rouge area or something. That sent me down a rabbit hole where I discovered pretty much what you share in this video.
My takeaway however is this; Tourism Boards in ANY given local will push the idea that ~ This City is the Biggest and Best because "Bigger number Better"
Population wonk here. It used to really throw me off in the past when my wife's Aunt that lives in the Greenville area of South Carolina always said that Greenville was 5 times the size of Rapid City. When I'd look at the Rand McNally I'd see the population was about the same. Then I visited her and understood.
Family lives around Greenville county… Greer to Anderson to Simpsonville! lol
Glad you mentioned MSP. It's all just "the metro" here, and it would make no sense to anyone to refer to Minneapolis' city limits as a separate place or defining of our population size, yet the named separation of the cities has resulted in this false perception. Even just adding Minneapolis and St. Paul together (only considered separate cities to begin with because a river runs between them) they jump from 46th+67th most populous all the way up to 19th. 3-4million people are part of this population center, making it the 16th most populous urban area. Similar story in Atlanta, from what I can tell.
One can argue that a metro area is one in which the residents have some kind of common thread with each other. A good working definition might be the way TV media market size is determined. By this definition, the SF Bay Area would not only include Santa Clara(San Jose), SF, Alameda(Oakland), Marin and Contra Costa counties, but also Sonoma, Napa and Solano counties. Similarly, LA metro would not only include LA and Orange counties, but also Ventura and parts of Riverside, San Bernardino and Santa Barbara counties
Urban area maps work for most but not all cities. Like Charlotte for example, is given 1.3 million as its urban area population, but major suburbs like Gastonia, Rock Hill, and Concord are designated as their own urban areas, and if you add them, the population goes up to 2 million, and being 37th to being 24th
I think urban area is definitely the best for international comparisons especially. Many countries don't have "counties" and the concept of a "city proper" differs so much from place to place.
In Australia, metropolitan areas are generally divided into roughly equal "LGAs" (Local Government Areas) aka City Councils, each consisting of 8-10 suburbs. There isn't one big one at the centre. For example in Melbourne, the "City of Melbourne" LGA has traditionally been one of the least populated because so little of it is residential - it focuses on the CBD/Downtown, huge parks, rail yards and waterfront, with only small pockets of residential. So nobody would ever refer to the "city proper" population in Australia when talking about a city's population. Melbourne, currently Australia's biggest city by urban area, wouldn't even make the top 10 by "city proper" if only the City of Melbourne LGA was counted, in fact probably at least 10 LGAs within the Melbourne area itself have a bigger population than the "City of Melbourne" LGA.
The concept of a "City Proper" really doesn't exist at all for this reason. Unlike the US, city councils don't have their own police, school system or public transport systems (they are all state run & funded) either, and the city council name doesn't even appear in Australian addresses, so the city proper measure is really irrelevant.
There's an issue with the most commonly used Australian category too, the "Greater Capital City Statistical Area", which is similar to that of US metro areas (the closest equivalent). Firstly, only the state capitals have one, so they count any area considered to be somehow linked to its nearest capital which like the US can also include rural or very disconnected areas. Due to that, Sydney's GCCSA for example includes the Central Coast, a very distinct urban area of its own, with significant physical separation. There's inconsistency with how this is applied, too, because the Central Coast is really no more a part of Greater Sydney than the Sunshine Coast in Queensland is to Greater Brisbane, but the Sunshine Coast isn't counted in Brisbane's GCCSA.
The measure we use which I have always thought is the most accurate is Significant Urban Area, the closest to the US urban area designation. The official guideline is that there can't be more than a 5km gap without the required population density.
This allows for boundaries to naturally adjust with sprawl. The most recent boundary change is to Melbourne, who as a result overtook Sydney as the largest urban area. Some people dismissed it as a "technicality" but the reason was that the roughly 10km of empty land between Melton and Melbourne's previous urban boundary has now been developed with about 3 new suburbs that now connect to Melton to Melbourne's continuous urban area. That is how the urban boundaries have always evolved over time.
I think it's the best measure, especially for international comparisons where government structures (eg. Cities, counties, LGAs or councils, boroughs, etc) are all different, so measuring something with a more physical criteria is more consistent.
I would like to say that as a Dallasite we aren’t much without are friends at Fort Worth. We are different as they have more rural areas (and better housing prices) and we are more dense, we are United in our endeavors.
Is there a link to a detailed map of all US urban areas somewhere? Would be a great resource
It is very hard to define because as you said it's almost always not apples to apples. Each city is defined by a unique set of features. So two " similar in features " cities are more easily compared but others are so different that it can't be compared. Often I think of how some urban areas just are continuous and ill defined vs others that are clearly defined.
The Urban Areas as defined by the US Census are influenced by commuter data. So Wilmington probably has more residents commuting to Philadelphia than Trenton does. This is in many ways more useful than Demographia's urban area definition, which combines cities like Washington-Baltimore and Boston-Providence. You could argue there is a fairly contiguous urbanized area from Amherst, MA to at Fredericksburg, VA, so any separation of "urban areas" will necessarily be subjective. I find that for many use cases, it makes more sense to combine individual census tracts into groups according to a *consistent* set of criteria.
I think UA is the most accurate, however because the numbers are only updated every 10 years during the census, I usually end up using the Metro area (MSA) as their numbers are updated every year with the census estimates. There is also a fourth category, the Combined statistical area (CSA) which combines metro areas that are close by such as San Fran and San Jose or Washington and Baltimore.
Urban area is what is used by Australians. If you look up the population of Sydney or Melbourne they are listed at 5 million each which far exceeds most US city propers. This has always been how we measured it here and it always confused me as to why Americans used city propers especially when it was sometimes very arbitrary.
I agree with You. Indeed, urban area *is* the best measure.
9:30 ao i live in korea and this is my gripe with korean definitions of cities. They include all the small towns, villages, etc. like the city i live in is actually considered bigger than the capital, Seoul (one of if not the largest city of the country by the urban(?) measurements) by the land perimeter.
They count all the towns that are under jurisdiction of the biggest city in the area, and they keep combining them too!
Ditto on the Bay Area. It's always fascinated me that within the land smaller than some city propers, we have multiple MSAs. For work we often group clients' employee populations by MSA, and it's frustrating how locally-based clients often have their "largest" MSAs far away because the actual largest site have employees commuting in from 3-5 separate MSAs.
I'd like to see the map of urbanized areas shaded by population-weighted density, with a large enough number of gradations to make looking at Greater NJ (i.e. metro NYC, Trenton, metro Philly) interesting. Assessing at county level is useless, use blocks or some kind of block groups. Where we draw the lines between dense groups, how we name them, and how they correspond to the various Census designations is secondary.
I’d say in the suburban state that is New Jersey, the inherent exclusion of Trenton in Philly’s MSA (but the inclusion of Wilmington, DE) is merely due to it being the capital of the State.
Wilmington would historically & distinctly matter more if it had stayed the capital of Delaware.
If New Jersey had its capital in Cape May, Atlantic City, Toms River or Vineland; Trenton would by now, be an industrial edge city/affordable suburb of Philadelphia, akin to Camden or Wilmington, DE.
@@bkark0935 It's as if the definition makers are thinking "we know NYC and Philly are separate metropolitan areas, now let's decide what an MSA is."
I got grief a year or two ago by someone in a RUclips comment section by my calling Anaheim, CA a suburb of Los Angeles. In my mind, being in a separate county isn't enough to separate Anaheim from the sprawling metropolis that is Los Angeles.
The practical rule is if a random person on the other side of the country has heard of it then it's its own city. Philadelphia is more distinct from New York than Anaheim from LA than Evanston from Chicago.
I think the hard part of determining where LA ends is that the feeder cities have feeder cities. If you include them, suddenly you have places like MoVal, Banning, and Victorville being "LA." Which feels silly, but a compelling argument could be made.
@@PythonicMethod With Victorville, there is a range of large mountains between it and LA, but also a lot of commuting back and forth through the pass.
I think the best was is to survey the people living there. Ask them "where do you live?" And use their answers (compared to their actual location) to define the urban areas. "I live in Miami" vs actually being from Florida City.
As somebody that grew up in the suburbs of Orlando Florida, every time I meet someone from out of state my answer was always "Orlando" not Maitland, Kissimmee etc. This also allows for an organic approach as the people actually living there will define it vs some bureaucrats in a room, and people on the periphery of two cities (say in College Park between Baltimore and DC) will likely show a gradient that more represents how their identity actually is.
Thanks for addressing this in a great presentation.
1. Jacksonville Proper is the largest US city in square miles. It contains farms within its borders. One needs to travel miles to get to a true farm from Philly.
2. Houston overtook Philly as the 5th largest city in the 80s. Boo! Houston cheated by gobbling up suburbs. 😂 Philly did the same centuries ago.
3. Similar confusion with sururbs: How one measures, some really don't exist. A suburb might cross county lines, so it's really not real census-wise.
For example, Cherry Hill is a Philly suburb in southern NJ. I must have been there thousands of times, I still don't know its boundaries.
4. This leads to confusion of what area 'owns' major sports franchises. The biggest one, both San Fran and Oakland Propers, have multiple teams. However, the metro includes many more. While teams that play in NJ and LI, all are included in NYC total. I know, i know, the Islanders now play in Brooklyn. They used to play in the suburbs. Brooklyn and Queens are on LI, so their name is fine.
The Patriots play closer to Providence, RI than Boston.
So, for trivia questions, what should one consider?
The reason why Goodyear is separate from Phoenix is that (1) it's dense enough to count as its own urban core and (2) there's a large enough gap of rural land between it and Phoenix that by the Census Bureau's regulations it cannot be added to Phoenix's total. The maximum gap between urban areas that Census Bureau will extend an urban core out by is 1.5 miles. If there is a rural gap exceeding that distance between two urban cores, then the Census Bureau separates them.
The reason why the San Jose and San Francisco-Oakland urban areas are separate has to do with worker flows. Most continuous urban areas in the US have multiple cities that could qualify as urban cores. I believe the area from New York to Philadelphia is actually a single continuous urban area. As is the area from Baltimore to Washington (Baltimore's and Washington's downtowns are only about 40 miles apart, about the same distance as San Francisco's and San Jose's downtowns).
In order to determine if a city deserves to be a separate urban area of its own, the Census Bureau looks at worker flows in and out of the city, and especially between the various cities that could qualify as urban cores. Using this data, the Census Bureau has determined that while Oakland does not amount to a separate core from San Francisco, San Jose does. What this means is that there isn't a significant enough worker flow between San Jose on one hand and San Francisco-Oakland on the other. Worker-wise they are separate cities.
Given the significant switch to remote work that's happened since the 2020 census regulations were issued, the Census Bureau is probably going to have to develop a different way to measure this for the 2030 census.
In Canada, our Census Metropolitan Areas are more or less the same as your Urban Areas measurement: "large, densely populated centres made up of adjacent municipalities that are economically and socially integrated". They have a complex way to measure whether to break up adjacent major core areas into seperate CMA's or combine them into one. However overall of course, it results in Canadian metro politan areas having much smaller official populations than what are actually similar sized US metro areas eg Vancouver and Seattle.
Measuring by metropolitan area makes a lot of sense, although another measure I would probably add is population density.
I've always considered in my head places like Newark and Jersey City to be "part" of NYC, even though they're technically not. To me, if you can drive from one place to another without having to cross a significant gap in development and population density, then you're still in the same city in some way.
This is why it annoys me that everyone says london is bigger than new York yet in any list its placed above
I agree with the weirdness of conurbations. Ohio suffers from this issue a lot when determining the three C's populations. Mostly between Cinci and Cleveland. Both cities are wide spread urban sprawls with secondary/tertiary major cities (Dayton & Akron/Canton respectively) vaguely connected to them yet when it comes to discerning urban or metro population counts, Cleveland gets to include Akron/Canton completely into their numbers but Dayton is separated (much like San Jose) from Cincinnati even tho there is clear economic integration & development between the city centers. I could understand back in 1905 when they first determined economic connections that Cleveland and Akron might've been more tied to each other during the manufacturing era but after over 100 years those connections need to be reevaluated
Years ago, Mexico decided to place every square inch of the country into a municipality, so that you can vote for a mayor and councilmen even if you are super far from the nearest city. It makes sense if you think about it. The city closest to you has the power to set policies that affect your employment, transportation choices, medical facilities, and many other things. So to have zero say in things that affect your life fosters a sense of powerlessness. The Mexican system is better.
Urban area is always my go-to for the truest city size we have available. To piggyback on your multi-core note, Washington and Baltimore are very close to becoming one continuous urban area. This would bump that area up to 4th in the county with ~7.4 million people.
Ooh this one’s a banger
7:04. The south (except CA) tend to have lower taxes which may be why city proper growth may have been more common in the south. People move out of the city in part to avoid city taxes
Underrated!!!!!