City region

City region is a term in use since about 1950 by urbanists, economists and urban planners to mean a metropolitan area and hinterland, often having a shared administration. Typically, it denotes a city, conurbation or urban zone with multiple administrative districts, but sharing resources like a central business district, labour market and transport network such that it functions as a single unit.

In studying human geography, urban and regional planning or the regional dynamics of business it is often worthwhile to have closer regard to dominant travel patterns during the working day (to the extent that these can be estimated and recorded) than to the rather arbitrary boundaries assigned to administrative bodies such as councils, prefectures, or localities defined merely to optimise postal services. Inevitably, city regions change their shapes over time and quite reasonably, politicians seek to redraw administrative boundaries by perceived geographic reality. The extent of a city region is usually proportional to the intensity of activity in and around its central business district, but the spacing of competing centres of population can also be highly influential. It will be appreciated that a city region need not have a symmetrical shape, and that is especially true in coastal or lakeside situations (such as Oslo, Southampton or Chicago).

In the United Kingdom, the city regional agenda began to be seen as an alternative to the regional assemblies in England that were favoured as a partial answer to the West Lothian question but rejected in a referendum by voters in North East England in November 2004. The concept of city regions and their development features heavily in The Northern Way, a collaborative development plan between the three northernmost English regional development agencies. An embryonic city regional framework exists in the form of the Passenger Transport Executive and the Core Cities Group. The October 2006 Local Government White Paper did not contain firm proposals for city-region-wide authorities however.

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