Metropolitan area
- For metro areas in the US, see United States metropolitan area
A
metropolitan area or
conurbation is a large population center that consists of several
cities or
towns clustered together with one or more large cities serving as its hub or hubs.
A conurbation (short for:
continuous urbanisation) is an urban area consisting of a series of towns or cities, which through expansion, have merged together to form one continuous built up area.
A metropolitan area usually combines a conurbation proper (the contiguous built-up area) with peripheral zones not themselves necessarily urban in character but closely bound to the conurbation by employment or commerce; these zones are also sometimes known as a
commuter belt. In France the official term for a metropolitan area is an
aire urbaine.
The term metropolitan area is sometimes abbreviated to 'metro', for example in
Metro Manila and
Washington, DC Metro Area, and then should not be mistaken to mean the
metro rail system of the city.
If several metropolitan areas are located in succession, metropolitan areas are sometimes grouped together as a
megalopolis. A megalopolis consists of several interconnected
cities (and their suburbs), between which people commute, and which are so close together that suburbs can claim to be suburbs of more than one city. This concept was first proposed by the French geographer Jean Gottmann in his book
Megalopolis, who studied the northeastern United States. One famous example is the
BosWash megalopolis consisting of
New York City, Boston,
Baltimore,
Washington,
Philadelphia,
Hartford, and vicinity. Other megalopolis are
Tokyo,
Osaka, the
Ruhr Area, the
Low Countries, and the south east region of
England centred on
London.
Megacity is a general term for
cities together with their
suburbs or recognized metropolitan area usually with a total
population in excess of 10 million people. Whereas the term
city includes importance, density and legal status of a place, the term
megacity concentrates on size only.
In
1950 New York was the only such area; there are currently (2002) twenty, with twelve of those areas having exceeded 10 million since 1990. This has happened as the entire world population moves towards the high (75-85%) urbanization levels of
North America and
Western Europe. It is not clear that any city exclusive of its suburbs exceeds 10 million.
As well as all these cities experiencing some growth, by 2015 there could be a further six megacities. However the expansion of megalopolis is probably a greater trend, such as the previously mentioned Tokyo-Osaka, or
Baltimore-
Washington or
Rio de Janeiro-
São Paulo.
In
Canada,
megacity refers informally to the results of having merged the suburbs of an urban region into one large municipality. Cities so merged include
Winnipeg, Manitoba (this merger antedates the term, and was called "Unicity" at the time),
Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Toronto, Ontario,
Ottawa, Ontario,
Hamilton, Ontario,
Greater Sudbury, Ontario,
Montreal, Quebec,
Gatineau, Quebec,
Longueuil, Quebec,
Quebec City, Quebec,
Saguenay, Quebec, and
Lévis, Quebec. A Canadian "megacity", however, is not necessarily an entirely urban area, as many cities so named have both rural and urban portions.
In Japan, individual cities remain rather small but they form metropolitan areas or conurbations such as the capital zone in
Tokyo or keihan zone in
Osaka,
Kobe and
Kyoto.
Megacities in fiction
Fictional mega-cities feature in much dystopian science fiction, with cities such as the Sprawl and Mega-City One. In the comic 2000 A.D, the fictional Mega-City One is a megalopolis of 800 million people across the east coast of the United States, policed by Judge Dredd.
See also
\n*United States metropolitan areas\n*List of metropolitan areas by population\n*Largest European cities\n*List of fifteen largest metropolitan areas of France by population\n*List of World Metropolises
External link
\n*metropolis.org - An organisation of world metropolises\n
