2 ms·
Measuring city size is a tricky endeavor. Municipal borders are pretty arbitrary and so not a great way to decide what the real size of the urbanized area is. T
by bradleyjg 10y ago
Measuring city size is a tricky endeavor. Municipal borders are pretty arbitrary and so not a great way to decide what the real size of the urbanized area is. The OECD has a methodology they call "functional urban areas"[1] that starts by identifying linked high density clusters and then refining from there.
Using their methodology the order is: LA, NYC, Chicago, SF, Houston, DC, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, and Phoenix.[2]
[1] https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/Definition-of-Functional-Urban-Areas-for-the-OECD-metropolitan-database.pdf https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/Definition-of-Funct...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/functional-urban-areas-all-united-states.pdf https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/functional-urban-ar...
- sien 10y agoThe wikpedia list of Primary Statistical Areas is pretty useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_primary_statistical_areas_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_primary_statistical_ar...
- kodablah 10y agoEven those are way too large to represent "city areas" (i.e. metropolitan areas). A more reasonable comparison may be to use their subdivisions, MSA's [0], which can help overcome issues with city boundaries but they too are of course a bit arbitrary and misleading but can also give a better showing of size [1]. I've seen these used in many statistical scenarios concerning population centers. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...
- sremani 10y agoTricky indeed, esp. in a world where Dallas ends up behind Miami and Atlanta, the likely fault of Dallas is that it has a quasi twin city called Ft.Worth.
- FrancoDiaz 10y agoYeah, I always thought Dallas metro (including Ft. Worth) was bigger than Houston metro.