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Conceptions of the City-Region: A Critical Review

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 Proceedings of the Institution of
Civil Engineers
Urban Design and Planning
Month 2008 Issue DP?
Pages 1–10
doi
Paper 800019
Received 19/10/2007
Accepted 28/04/2008
Simin Davoudi
Keywords: history/public policy/ Professor of Environmental
reviews Policy and Planning, Newcastle
University, UK
Conceptions of the city-region: a critical review
S. Davoudi BArch, MPhil, MRTP, AcSS
Since the 1990s, there has been a remarkable resurgence of
the concept of the city-region in both academic and policy
communities. In broad terms, the concept articulates the
relationships between the city and its environs. While the
city-region’s rising popularity is recent, its origin is not. However,
despite its long history, the concept of the city-region does not
enjoy a common definition, neither in its use as an analytical term
nor in its upsurge as a political one. While there are clear linkages
between the two, the main focus of this review is on the city-
region as an analytical construct. Hence, the paper provides a
critical review of the different methodologies that have been
employed over the last 50 years for defining and mapping the
city-region. This work shows that, despite their variations, they
share two common features—an urban-centric view of the city-
region and an economically driven approach to its definition.
These are further elaborated by focusing on the prevailing
conception of the city-region as a functional economic space and
the dominant top-down approach to delineate the boundaries of
what is known as the functional urban region.
1. INTRODUCTION: THE ASCENDANCE OF THE
CITY-REGION
After about thirty years of policy focus on urban (particularly
inner urban) areas, the 1990s saw a shift of emphasis towards
the city-region. Indeed, the concept of the city-region, which in
broad terms articulates the relationships between the city and
its environs, has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in both
academic and policy communities. Its revival is not only a
reincarnation of an analytical construct to understand complex
spatial relations, but also a manifestation of a political move
towards new regionalism.1 This has been coupled with the
rescaling of state intervention to intermediate levels such as the
city-region.2
While the city-region’s rising popularity is recent, its origin is
not. The idea that the city cannot be understood fully by
reference only to its administrative boundaries has a long
history. The term itself is thought to have been coined by
Robert Dickinson in 19473 but the concept was used well before
that in both research and planning practices. For example, as
early as 1909, the Chicago Plan was already promoting a
regional vision of the city that extended well beyond its
administrative boundaries.4 Similarly, in 1915 Geddes5 used the
notion of conurbation to advocate the need for planning to
take into account the resources of regions in which historic but
rapidly spreading cities are situated. Furthermore, in 1933,
Urban Design and Planning XX Issue DPX
UDP-D-07-00003R2.indd 1
McKenzie, an American sociologist, was pointing out that ‘the
metropolitan (or city) region . . . is primarily a functional entity.
Geographically it extends as far as the city exerts a dominant
influence’.6
However, despite its long history the concept of the city-region
does not enjoy a common definition, neither in its use as
an analytical term nor in its upsurge as a political one.
Analytically, it represents different spatial entities depending
on how it has been arrived at methodologically. Politically, it
means different things depending on the type of policy agenda
it serves. In practice, the concept is frequently used simply to
refer to the areal extent of a metropolitan area. While there are
clear linkages between the analytical and political usages of the
concept, the main focus of this review is on the city-region as
an analytical construct. As such, a key contribution of the
concept to spatial thinking is its departure from a preoccupa-
tion with the physical structure of the city and the urban form
per se towards a focus on the relational dynamics of the social
networks and urban functions that often transcend the bounded
perceptions of space. Hence, the contemporary relevance and
significance of the city-region concept lies in its potential—
firstly, to evoke a relational understanding of space and place
in policy and practice; secondly, to encourage researchers to
seek new methodologies for capturing the less tangible
interconnections that define the virtual contours of what
Castells7 called the space of flows.
2. THE CITY-REGION INTERACTIONS
There is an increasing recognition that city-regional
relationships are dynamic and evolve over time, spanning
multiple boundaries in a variable geometry of overlapping
spaces with flexible and blurred contours. Some fifty years ago,
Duncan8 noted that ‘there is no such thing as a single, uniquely
defined “region” that manifests a full spectrum of city-regional
relationships’. Indeed, city-region relations constitute a
complex web of visible and invisible multi-directional flows of
not only economic but also social, cultural and environmental
activities. These include flows of, for example
(a) people (daily commuting to work, shopping and leisure;
non-daily commuting for cultural, entertainment and
recreational activities; migration)
(b) goods (manufacturing and semi-processed materials
between firms)
(c) services (banking, educational, health, business)
Conceptions of the city-region: a critical review S. Davoudi BArch 1
5/14/2008 2:30:27 PM
 (d) capital and assets (investment, taxes, land ownership,
property rights)
(e) waste and pollution (solid waste, emissions, water
pollution)
(f) environmental resources (water, minerals)
(g) knowledge (technical information, social ideas and
experiences)
(h) social norms, values, lifestyles and identities.
Through these interactions, cities and regions potentially share
a mutually reinforcing relationship. Furthermore, each of these
linkages creates its own spatial imaginaries and functional
boundaries that do not always overlap. The outcome is a
complex web of interactions and a multiplicity of boundaries.
As Hawley, an American sociologist, suggests, ‘. . . the
boundaries of the modern community, instead of being precise
lines, are blurred, if not indeterminate. Each index yields a
different description of a community’s margins . . . nothing less
than a combination of indexes is adequate for the fullest
approximation to an appropriate boundary’.9
However, despite this long-standing recognition of the
complexity and emergence of the city-region’s spatial struc-
tures, attempts to define the city-region have remained almost
entirely focused on economic relationships that in turn are
narrowly defined by labour market areas, using journey-to-
work data. This, as will be discussed later, has led to the
dominance of an urban-centred and economically driven
concept of the city-region.
3. DEFINING THE CITY-REGION
The concept of the city-region, like all concepts, is a mental
construct. It is not, as some planners and scholars seem to think,
an area which can be presented on a platter to suit their general
needs.10
Since the 1950s, numerous studies have attempted to define the
components of the city-region; identify, measure and map its
boundaries; and understand the interactions between its
constituent parts. Despite their variations they share two
common features. Firstly, they portray an urban-centric
conception of the city-region that puts emphasis on the city,
sometimes at the expense of neglecting the region. Secondly,
they represent an economically driven approach to city-region
definition in which the dominant economic flows determine
the extent of the city-region. Exceptions to these do exist but
are rare and more recent. This is not to suggest that the
urban-economic approach to city-region definition has gone
unchallenged. On the contrary, while its urban-centric dimen-
sion has been questioned by the changing patterns of work,
mobility and lifestyle in rural areas,11 its economic determinism
has been disputed in the face of growing recognition of the
ecological functions of cities and their environmental footprints
on their hinterlands and beyond.12 However, it remains the case
that the most common and deeply embedded interpretation
of the city-region is its conceptualisation as a functional
economic space. The remainder of this paper will provide a
historical review of this interpretation and an outline of the
different methodologies that have been used to map its spatial
structure.
2 Urban Design and Planning XX Issue DPX Conceptions of the city-region: a critical review
UDP-D-07-00003R2.indd 2
4. THE CITY-REGION AS A FUNCTIONAL
ECONOMIC SPACE
Conceptualising the city-region as a functional economic space
(as pioneered by Berry et al.13) has remained an enduring and
powerful spatial imagination. For example, a recent study
commissioned by the UK Government to produce a ‘framework
for city-regions’ states that ‘conceptual underpinning is clear:
city-regions are essentially functional definitions of the
economic . . . “reach” of cities’.14 Within this perspective, the
city-region is depicted as a largely self-contained and
integrated economic entity, commonly known as the functional
urban region (FUR).
The concept of the FUR was first developed in the USA as
a way of moving away from an earlier population-based
concept of the metropolitan district that referred to urban
agglomerations with more than 200 000 inhabitants. The shift
took place when Gras,15 an economic historian, used economic
rather than spatial criteria to identify fourteen metropolitan
areas in North America. Later, the notion of the ‘metropolitan
area’ was formally adopted by the US Bureau of the Census in
1950—called the standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA)
and referring to areal units of over 50 000 population. The
defining characteristic of the ‘metropolis’ was considered to be
the commuting pattern of the workforce, which was assumed to
be radial from the periphery to the centre(s) where jobs were
located. Such a definition was clearly reflected in McKenzie’s
description of the metropolitan area: ‘structurally, this new
metropolitan regionalism is axiate in form. The basic elements
of its patterns are centres, routes and rims’.6 In the UK, the
notion of conurbation, coined by Geddes5 in 1915 and further
developed by Fawcett16 in 1932, was spatially rather than
functionally defined. Fawcett16 argued that
One of the most important and striking developments in the
growth of the urban population…has been the appearance of a
number of vast urban aggregates, or conurbations… These have
usually been formed by the simultaneous expansion of a
number of neighbouring towns, which have grown out towards
each other until they have reached a practical coalescence in
one continuous urban area.
Fawcett defined seven conurbations in Britain that more or less
corresponded to those that were later delineated by statisticians
in the General Register Office (GRO) using the 1951 census. For
them, ‘the conurbation generally should be a continuous built
up area’ with some consideration being given to population
density.17 However, they adhered strictly to the existing
administrative boundaries in defining their limits.10 So, at the
time when the British statistical authorities were using the
concept of conurbation defined largely on the basis of the
physical extent of a city, on the other side of the Atlantic,
SMSAs put functional integration at the centre of the definition
of metropolitan areas. Meanwhile, in other parts of Europe
researchers were drawing on criteria similar to those used to
define the SMSA to delineate city-regions. A notable example
is Carol’s definition of Zurich city-region in 1956.18 Given the
strong influence of Christaller’s central place theory19 on the
continent, Carol combined two approaches (one based on
commuting data to define a city-region and the other based on
the range of services to define a hierarchy of service centres) to
map the arrangement of central places in the city-region of
S. Davoudi BArch
5/14/2008 2:30:27 PM
 Zurich. He then argued that a planned decentralisation of
activities should be guided by this framework.
By the 1970s, the functional approach was introduced in the
UK through the study of standard metropolitan labour areas
(SMLAs) for England and Wales by Hall and his team.20 Both
the SMSA and SMLA consist of the historic city plus its
commuting hinterland, instead of being limited to the
contiguous built-up areas centred upon a particular city. The
functional approach to the city-region definition was advanced
by further studies21–24 and as part of a pan-European research
programme on spatial planning called ESPON 2006 (European
Spatial Planning Observation Network (www.espon.eu)). As will
be discussed later, ESPON has had limited success due to a lack
of consistent and comparable data and methodologies.
As regards the utilisation of the FUR in policy and practice,
Parr25 argues that ‘the importance of the CR [city-region] as an
organising element in the space economies of developed
nations has long been recognised. Until relatively recently,
however, this recognition was largely confined to academic
circles’. This view is confirmed by evidence from a survey
conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) in 2002.26 The survey reveals that many
developed nations (e.g. Japan, Mexico, Korea, Spain and
Turkey) do not use the FUR for organising their national space
economies. It also shows that official recognition of the FUR as
the spatial unit for policy implementation varies considerably
from one country to another. In some countries, such as
Austria, Denmark and Switzerland, FURs are used for the
implementation of policies related mainly to labour markets
and transport. In other countries, e.g. Finland, France, Ger-
many, Italy and the UK, FURs, rather than administrative units,
are used to delineate areas that may qualify for national or
European aid. In Norway, the concept of the FUR has played a
significant role in discussions on regionalism. Finally, in
countries such as Portugal, Sweden, Czech Republic and the
USA, FURs are not used at all as the official spatial unit for
policy implementation. Nevertheless, adopting a FUR approach
(as a proxy for the city-region) to policy making has remained
an attractive proposition, particularly in the field of strategic
planning where the need for coordination and integration of
investments, policies and programmes is considered to be
critical. Indeed, such arguments have underpinned the current
debate in the UK over the co-aligning of local government
structures to those of the city-regions. However, as pointed out
by Parr,25 within this perspective the city-region corresponds to
the administrative boundaries of ‘the over bounded metropoli-
tan counties’ that were abolished in 1986. He argues that ‘of all
the contemporary perspectives on the CR, this one is…the least
in keeping with original spirit of the CR concept, largely
because concern is with the metropolitan area and not with the
wider region, of which it is the focus’.25
5. MAPPING FUNCTIONAL URBAN REGIONS
While there have been numerous attempts to define FURs,
emphasis has remained on the city as the node of interactions
and on the economy (or indeed on work-related commuting) as
the determining function. This has largely shaped (and been
shaped by) the methodologies that have been used to map
FURs. Despite their differences, such methodologies fall into
one of two broad categories—the top-down deductive approach
and the bottom-up inductive approach.14
Urban Design and Planning XX Issue DPX Conceptions of the city-region: a critical review
UDP-D-07-00003R2.indd 3
In the top-down deductive approach, analyses start from a
pre-determined set of ‘cities’ as nodes or destinations for
economic flows and then move out to assign other areas to
them.27 These cities (nodes) are selected on the basis of a
specified set of functions, population size, economic
performance (often measured by gross domestic product),
accessibility and connectivity, intensity of financial and
business services, etc. Depending on the weight given to the
criteria for the selection of nodes, the numbers of cities, and
hence the frequencies of the city-regions, reduce or increase.25
While a classic example of the top-down definition is the
official definition of SMSAs in the USA, the approach is also
used in countries such as Canada, France (urban areas),
Germany and Portugal,26 as well as in pan-European studies
such as ESPON 2006.
In the bottom-up inductive approach, city-regions emerge from
the full set of commuting data through an algorithm that
simultaneously optimises the boundaries on the basis of a
size of employment criterion and a minimum threshold of
self-containment of flows to workplaces.14 This approach has
become feasible only recently as a result of advances in data
manipulation and computation. It still remains an exceptional
feature of a landscape that is dominated by the traditional
top-down definition of the FUR (see Eurostat28 for a cross-
national review). The most notable attempt to adopt the
bottom-up approach is the work undertaken by Coombes et
al.29 Different variations of this approach are also used in
countries such as Finland, France (for defining employment
areas) and Italy.26 More recently, the application of aggregative
computer modelling, similar to that used in the bottom-up
approach, has been used to define housing market areas in the
UK.
In technical terms, while the first approach is nodal and
non-exhaustive (not covering the whole of the national
territory), the second is non-nodal (or multi-nodal) and
exhaustive.14 The difference in the approaches is clearly
illustrated in Figs 1 and 2, which show the resulting FURs for
England.
It can be argued that the top-down approach is underpinned by
an urban-centric conception of the city-region, while the
bottom-up approach marks a departure from it, shifting
emphasis from the city to the region. However, while the
bottom-up approach provides a more inclusive way of
understanding the complex flows of commuting across a wider
territory, it continues to be an economically driven approach
and largely reliant on travel-to-work analyses. One advantage
of the non-nodal approach is that it can reveal potential
polycentric patterns in the wider region. As Davoudi30 suggests,
promoting the development of such polycentric urban regions,
where a number of cities of similar size interact with each other
economically and complement each other in service provision,
has become a central objective of the European spatial
development policy. However, ironically, the approach taken in
the ESPON research to identify European functional urban
areas uses a top-down rather than bottom-up methodology, as
will be further elaborated below. Before that, the next section
provides an outline of the evolution of the most common (i.e.
the top-down) approach and its key features.
S. Davoudi BArch 3
5/14/2008 2:30:27 PM
 Fig. 1. The top-down approach to city-region definition in England, 2001. This is a nodal approach that starts from a set of pre-
selected cities and hence does not cover the whole of the mapped territory. The map shows the origin areas from which 25% or
more outward commuters travel to one of the destination nodes, and the catchment boundaries for each of the destination nodes.
Source: Robson et al.14

6. THE TOP-DOWN APPROACH
The top-down approach attributes two distinct but interrelated
components to the city-region: the inner core area (central
urban tract) and the outer surrounding area that is associated
with, and sometimes dominated by, the core. The two entities
have been given various terminologies. The inner area has been
called the core, the centre, the node, the city and the urban
tract. The outer area has attracted terms such as the hinterland
by Gras,15 umland (the land around) by the German scholar
Schöller,31 metropolitan community by Bogue32 and the region

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UDP-D-07-00003R2.indd 4 5/14/2008 2:30:27 PM

 Fig. 2. A bottom-up approach to city-region definition in England, 2001. This is a non-nodal approach that does not start from a set
of pre-selected cities and hence covers the whole of the mapped territory. Note that the dividing lines on the map delineate the
functional regions and do not necessarily correspond to administrative boundaries. The 70% self-containment14 refers to the
percentage of commuters not crossing the region’s boundary. Source: Robson et al.14

by McKenzie6 and Dickinson.3 Mumford33 called the city’s
region its field of association or catchment area. More recently,
Parr25 codified these two entities by calling them the ‘C zone’
and the ‘S zone’ to disassociate them from their historical
baggage and to use categories that are ‘exhaustive and
mutually exclusive’. According to Dickinson,10 the outer area
can be further divided into two categories—the city settlement
area or the daily commuting area, and the city trade area or the
catchment area for central services.
An early and striking example of a top-down, urban-centric
view of the city-region is portrayed by Bogue32 who, drawing

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UDP-D-07-00003R2.indd 5 5/14/2008 2:30:31 PM

 on biological analogies, delineated 67 metropolitan regions in
the USA based on an arbitrary system of decreasing values,
beginning with the metropolitan centre as dominant and
followed by the hinterland city as sub-dominant, the rural
non-farm as influent and the rural farm as sub-influent.
Another example of identifying association zones comes from
work undertaken by Boustedt.34 He defined the city-regions
(stadtregion) of Germany as consisting of a core (one or more
contiguous administrative units and associated gemeinden), an
urbanised zone (verstädterte zone), the fringe zone, and the
wider area of umland within which the influence of the city
predominates. Mapping the city-region (or more precisely
the FUR) has invariably involved identifying such zonal
arrangements. In the top-down approach, this starts with first
defining the core and then identifying the extent of its
influence by measuring economic flows to and from the core.
These are elaborated in turn.
6.1. Defining the ‘city’ in the city-region
A top-down approach to map the city-region starts with
defining the core city (or the urban tract). Traditionally, this
has referred to the compact and fairly contiguous built-up area.
Such an area has also been a defining feature of conurbation.
For example, Fawcett16 argued that ‘. . . a conurbation is an area
occupied by a continuous series of dwellings . . . etc., which are
not separated from each other by rural land’. This approach and
its follow up by the GRO in 1956 as well as the American
SMSA were designed partly to distinguish predominantly urban
areas from predominantly rural ones. In that sense, their
understanding of ‘conurbation’ was not the same as that of
Geddes.5 His was more consistent with the wider concept of the
city-region as a functional space and came closer to what
Friedmann and Miller35 called the urban field. It represented,
they argued, ‘. . . a new scale of urban living that will extend
far beyond existing metropolitan cores and penetrate deeply
into the periphery’.
Meanwhile in France, the notion of urban aggregates was
defined (for the 1954 census) as those contiguous communes
that were linked together primarily in terms of family
associations (cadre de l’ existence familiale). Interestingly, this
included the geographic framework in which, for example,
schools and shops were located but excluded workplaces.36 In
Germany, while there were no official definitions of urban
areas by census authorities at that time, several studies
attempted to define the city-region. A notable example is
Hesse’s work on typologies of gemeinden in southwest Germany
in the 1940s.37
Utilising the compactness of urban uses as a criterion remains
at the centre of the statistical definition of the core city as well
as the distinction between what is urban and what is rural. For
example, in Finland (in common with other Nordic countries)
a built-up area (taajama) refers to a cluster of buildings
containing at least 200 residents in which the distance between
buildings does not exceed 200 m.38 However, given the
diffusion of the urban–rural fringe, the definition of an
urbanised core in terms of continuous urban land uses has
become increasingly elusive and in many cases irrelevant.39 As
mentioned previously, definitions of the ‘urban’ based on
economic function have grown apart from definitions based on
physical development. For example, using the terms loosely,
6 Urban Design and Planning XX Issue DPX Conceptions of the city-region: a critical review
UDP-D-07-00003R2.indd 6
England is in physical terms predominantly rural but in
socio-economic terms overwhelmingly urban. Indeed, an
important feature of the city-region, particularly when based
on the bottom-up approach, is its potential to reveal the
multi-faceted interrelationships between urban and rural areas
within a particular spatial context.
6.2. Delineating the extent of the city-region
There are two ways of defining the extent of the city-region (or
indeed FUR) as a geographical entity: one is through statistical
analysis of actual flows and the other is by an approximation
of time–distance from the core.
6.2.1. Measuring flows. Dickinson10 argues that ‘. . . the
city-region can only be made precise and definable, as a
geographic entity, by reference to the precise areal extent of
particular association with the city’. He refers to the fact that
different economic, social, environmental and cultural
exchanges produce their own spatial structures and hence lead
to multiple and emerging rather than single and static bound-
aries. However, the hegemony of economic discourse, which in
turn has directed investments into a particular type of data
collection and analysis, has meant that the only city-region
interactions that have proved amenable to measurement and
mapping are the economic ones. These are often measured by
flows of people or, more precisely, flows of daily commuters to
work. This is evident from, for example, an OECD survey of
members that concludes ‘the most typical concept used in
defining a functional region is that of labour markets’.26
Within this perspective, after delineation of the core (the city),
the extent of the FUR is ‘determined by the inclusion of each
locality having more than a given percentage (as low as 10%)
of its employed labour force working in the C zone [the core
city]’25 and hence commuting from such localities to the core
on a daily basis. Clearly, the lower the proportion (or the
cut-off), the larger will be the extent of the FUR and vice versa.
In technical terms, a low percentage point will cause over-
bounding while a high threshold will lead to under-bounding.
In the case of the former, areas whose labour market linkages
with the core are not above a certain threshold will be excluded
from the resulting city-region, even if they may be tightly
connected to it through, for example, environmental, cultural
or administrative ties. Conversely, when the threshold is low,
the resulting FRU will engulf those cities and towns that fall
within the threshold even if they assume historical and political
independence.
The issue is not a mere technical one and can have
far-reaching implications for spatial planning, investment
programmes as well as the development of a sense of place and
identity. Indeed, a critical planning issue in the development of
regional spatial strategies in the UK has been the conflict over
such boundaries. In the Yorkshire and Humber region for
example, the inclusion of the city of York, which for many
years has assumed an independent historical administrative and
cultural identity, within the boundary (albeit fuzzy boundary)
of Leeds city-region became a contentious issue in the process
of spatial strategy making process.40 Hence, as Dickinson10
points out, it is important not to overlook the fact that, ‘the city
is a human phenomenon, not simply a bundle of statistics. Its
complex relations with its surroundings are as much cultural
and administrative in nature as they are economic’.
S. Davoudi BArch
5/14/2008 2:30:35 PM
 Indeed, a major criticism of conceptualising city-regions as
FURs is its heavy reliance on not only one type of interaction
(i.e. economic) but also on one economic criterion (i.e. travel to
work) for measuring that interaction. As Coombes and Wymer41
argue, such reductionism has been compounded by a lack of
attention to the differences between labour market areas for
various social groups. Often, the average commuting distance
of the higher order occupational groups (professional and
managerial) is much longer than that of the lower ones
(unskilled, manual), leading to more than one city-region
boundary even for one type of commuting. For instance, while
on average 40% of the UK’s working population cross at least
one administrative boundary during their journey to work
(based on the 2001 census), this figure increases for higher
skilled and professional workers.42 Furthermore, labour market
analyses have a limited utility in capturing the economic
relationships of the FUR. For a more inclusive approach, other
non-work trip-generation activities (e.g. journeys to shops,
services and leisure facilities) need to be taken into account
despite the difficulties in quantitatively measuring them.43 A
notable attempt to embrace the complexities of identifying the
boundaries of what are called the ‘localities’ in Britain of the
1990s, is the research undertaken by Coombes and colleagues.41
The study shows that when journeys to services are taken into
account, the city-region boundaries will further diverge.
An additional complexity arises when housing market areas are
brought into consideration. In practice, it appears that ‘the
search areas used by households making residential location
decisions tend to be strongly influenced by their “mental maps”
of areas with which they are familiar’.14 Such areas do not
necessary match that of the labour market area,44 hence
creating yet another boundary for the city-region. As
mentioned earlier, more recent definitions of housing market
areas in the UK, which use bottom-up analysis, have confirmed
this discrepancy.14
Added to this is the thorny issue of interactions between firms
and businesses, which are crucial in providing a meaningful
understanding of city-regional economic relationships. In
a recent ambitious attempt to capture such economic relation-
ships in ‘mega city-regions’, Hall and Pain45 tried to measure
the interactions between firms and businesses that act as key
intermediaries in the knowledge economy, such as advanced
business services, financial institutions, law, accountancy and
management consultancies. Given that many such interactions
take place in cyberspace via the internet, measuring them has
proved notoriously difficult if not impossible. What is certain is
that these interactions take place within a city-regional
boundary that is likely to be different from that emerging from
journey-to-work analyses. Hence, the key message is that there
is no single city-region boundary. Instead, the city-region
geometry is best characterised by multiplicity, fuzziness
and overlaps, manifesting only an approximation of self-
containment that is likely to vary for different kinds of
activities, flows and functions.
6.2.2. Approximating the time-distance. In addition to the
use of statistical analyses of actual commuting flows, there
have also been attempts to map FURs using an approximated
time–distance considered to be reasonable or convenient for
Urban Design and Planning XX Issue DPX Conceptions of the city-region: a critical review
UDP-D-07-00003R2.indd 7
daily commuting. This, prior to the introduction of public
transport in the late 19th century, was considered to be a
three-mile radius—a distance comfortable for travel by ‘foot
and hoof’. In The Modern Metropolis, Blumenfeld46 argued that
the reasonable travel time from the outskirts to the centre had
to be ‘no more than forty minutes’. Geddes’ rule of thumb for
convenient commuting distance was one hour.5 Whilst most
commentators have used the latter as the maximum commuting
distance, Batten47 argued for the lower limit of half an hour.
More recently, studies undertaken under the ESPON 2006
programme48 used a measure of forty five minutes drive time as
a proxy for identifying potential functional urban areas across
Europe. In all these, lines of equal time–distance to and from
the city (isochrones) are used to define the extent of the
city-region.
Whatever is considered a comfortable commuting time, this
methodology remains arbitrary and suffers from the same
flawed assumption that was made by Bogue in 1949 when he
mapped metropolitan regions in the USA. He assumed that
accessibility between one centre and another was a basic
determinant of city-regional relations. The assumption was that
‘a metropolis can dominate all of the area which lies closer to it
than to any other similar city, even if the other metropolis is
larger’.32 While proximity may be necessary for the creation of
a functional economic space, it is certainly not sufficient.
Having said that, as speed and convenience of travel increase,
so will the isochrone and hence the extent of the FUR because
people can, if other conditions are right, commute further
distances within the same time span. A notable example of the
role of infrastructure in expanding the FUR is the development
of Oresund Bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo, which has
led to the creation of a trans-national city-region.
Defining the extent of FURs confronts researchers with further
challenges when the scale of analysis rises to European level. A
lack of consistent and comparable data and methodologies has
led to the creation of NUTS (nomenclature of statistical
territorial units) by the European Statistical Office (Eurostat).
NUTS classification was introduced in the 1970s in order to
produce regional statistics for the European Union (EU). It was
given legal status in 2000 and since then has been amended a
few times, making historical comparison very difficult. The
NUTS classification is based on administrative boundaries as
defined by each EU country. It includes three ‘regional’ levels
(NUTS 1–3) and two local levels (local administrative units 1,
2). There are two main drawbacks to this approach. One is that
administrative grounds for defining ‘regions’ differ widely from
country to country, making European comparability difficult to
achieve even in terms of area and population. Hence, for
example, NUTS 3 regions in Spain (including 52 provincias) are
considerably larger than those in Germany (including 439
Kreise).49 The second drawback is that none of the NUTS levels
are defined on the basis of functional relations. Hence, in a
recent attempt to identify FURs across 29 countries in Europe,
the ESPON 2006 programme had to use national definitions of
FURs that varied considerably from one country to another.
Based on these definitions, the study identified 1595 ‘functional
urban areas’, out of which 76 were considered to be metropoli-
tan European growth areas (MEGAs). These were selected on a
top-down basis using population size and significance in terms
of
S. Davoudi BArch 7
5/14/2008 2:30:35 PM
 (a) economic competitiveness (measured by gross value added
in industry)
(b) knowledge base (measured by numbers of university
students)
(c) accessibility (measured by numbers of airport passengers
and volume of port-related freight)
(d) decision making (numbers of headquarters of top 1500
European firms)
(e) public administration (measured by the highest level of
public administration located there).50
It is clear that the methodology and choice of indicators were
determined not by a coherent conception of the city-region (or
even the FUR) but by the availability of comparable data across
Europe. Such a data-driven approach to research is by no
means exclusive to the ESPON programme. It is an unfortunate
side-effect of a desire to widen (rather than deepen) the
analysis to cover the European territory as a whole in most
European spatial analyses.
7. CONCLUSION
The city-region has enjoyed a widespread resurgence in recent
years in both analytical and political terms. The focus of this
account has been on the former, aiming to unpack the concept,
trace its origin and explore its evolution. Particular emphasis
was placed on a critical review of the methodological
approaches to the definition of FURs.
While in the last 60 years or so, many approaches have been
adopted to define the city-region and map its boundaries, this
review has shown that, with a few exceptions, the dominant
concept of the city-region has been urban-centric and econom-
ic-driven. The supremacy of this urban-economic perspective
relates partly to the historical evolution of the spatial structure
of the city-region. This, until the mid-20th century, was largely
influenced by a continuing concentration of population and
economic activities in the core city in most of the developed
world. Although this trend began to reverse in the latter part of
the 20th century (mainly in parts of Western Europe and North
America where population and, later, employment began to
decentralise25), it did not substantially change the urban-
economic perspective. Indeed such a view has now been further
boosted by the re-emergence of cities as the perceived magnets
for attracting population and economic activities and a
prevailing policy framework based on competitive city-
regionalism.51, 52 It is argued that ‘competitive cities create
prosperous regions…through a potential chain reaction which
can follow from a high level commitment to strengthen a city’s
knowledge base as a launch pad for stronger economic
performance and a distinctive external profile’.53 While the
evidence for such ‘trickle down’ or ‘ripple out’ effects is yet to
be documented (in fact a recent study has shown that economic
spillover from one city to the surrounding area is highly
contextual and hence hard to generalise54), this argument
continues to frame the debate about the city-region in both
analytical and political terms.
Analytically, it has fuelled the dominance of the urban-centric
and economically oriented conception of the city-region. This
is clearly reflected in the interpretation of the city-region as a
FUR and the top-down approach to define its boundaries.
8 Urban Design and Planning XX Issue DPX Conceptions of the city-region: a critical review
UDP-D-07-00003R2.indd 8
Politically, it has become the key justification for channelling
policy attention, investments and political powers towards the
economic growth of major cities, often at the expense of those
parts that fall outside the cities’ hinterlands. Gonazales et al.11
argue that attentions have been re-directed to the relationships
between the city (and more precisely the larger city) and
the region rather than to the city-region itself, with the
consequential neglect of smaller towns and rural areas.
Furthermore, a key shortcoming in the current city-region
agenda is separation of the debate about the city-region as an
economic space from discussion on the city-region as an
ecological entity. Contemporary city-regions are key sites of
consumption of environmental resources and production of
waste. As such, they are engaged in not only economic
exchanges and distributions of benefits, but also in ecological
exchanges and distribution of risks and disadvantages. An
illustrative example of this is municipal waste management,
where city-regional relationships are based largely on
generation of waste in the city and its disposal in the hinter-
land and beyond.55 Critical examination of how these changing
ecological interactions may re-shape our conceptions of the
city-region and deepen our understanding of the emerging
relational dynamics of the city-region space will therefore
make a valuable contribution in taking the city-regional debate
forward.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
A different version of this paper will appear in The Interna-
tional Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, edited by R. Kitchin
and N. Thrift, published by Elsevier. The author would like to
thank the reviewers of this article for their constructive
comments.
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