METRO NATION: ROLE AND IMPORTANCE OF US METROPOLITAN AREAS

Metro Nation: Role and Importance of US Metropolitan Areas

Metro Nation: Role and Importance of US Metropolitan Areas

Metropolitan Area

An area or metropolitan area is an urban region, which includes a central city that gives its name to the area and a series of satellite cities that can function as dormitory towns, industrial, commercial and services, organized in a centralized manner.

Metropolitan areas are large population centers (central cities) together with their adjacent zones of influence, where influence may be measured by levels of commuting to the central city or by commercial ties and media penetration—thus typically encompassing rural areas and physically separate satellite towns that are economically integrated with the core city (Lewis, 2006).

Statistics Evidence

The metropolitan area designation proved immensely popular, in part because it gave competing cities some sense of their relative importance in the national economy, as well as becoming a useful measure of growth from census to census (Morrill, 2010).

Table 1 U.S. metropolitan population, 2000 (in millions). By 2008, the metropolitan population is at least 84% of the total population of more than 300 million. Note that metropolitan areas do contain a sizable rural population and that the “other urban” category, mainly suburbs, exceeds the central city population.

Category

Population

% Share

Metropolitan

226

80

Central city

85

30

Other urban

115

41

Rural

26

9

Nonmetropolitan

55

20

Urban

23

8

Rural

32

12

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. (n.d.). Number of inhabitants, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, urbanized areas. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Even in the modern postindustrial era, the environmental settings of cities remain important. For example, many of the largest cities in the Eastern United States are located along or near a seacoast or lakefront, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami. Other major cities can be found along interior waterways, such as Minneapolis, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh, which originated and continue to ...