Metropolitan regions are far more important than single cities

So why don't we govern them as a single unit?

Atlanta has a population of 500,000, but a metro population of 6.1 million. Photo by ibuki Tsubo on Unsplash

I’m back! After a brief, unannounced hiatus I’ve returned to my normal weekly cadence of articles here on Substack. I sort of got hit by a triple threat of travel, spinning up new projects, and personal issues through the month of October that sapped a bunch of my time and, more importantly, mental energy. But as some of that clears, I’m able to more fully return to writing here. Which is great because I love writing about geography!

Today, we’re going to talk about something that is very important to me as both a human geographer and a former city planner: the metropolitan region. Almost always, unless I very specifically call it out otherwise, when I’m talking about a city — Portland, New York City, London, Guangzhou, etc. — I’m actually talking about the entire metro region and not just the core city. The reasons for this are plenty, but first let’s take it back and run through the differences.

(From here, the article is going to get pretty U.S.-centric because that’s where I’m based and that’s what my experience is but I have a feeling this is similar in a lot of different places.)

Metro or city?

While the terms "metropolitan region" and "city" are often used interchangeably in everyday conversation, they actually have very distinct meanings in the world of geography and urban planning.

A city is a specific urban settlement with defined boundaries and a local governing body. It is a political entity with its own administration, laws, and services. Cities can vary widely in size, from small towns with a few thousand residents to sprawling metropolises with millions of inhabitants. The boundaries of a city are set and can only be changed through legal or political processes. Additionally, a city typically has a central core where the majority of commercial, cultural, and civic activities take place.

On the other hand, a metropolitan region encompasses a broader region that includes a densely populated urban core and its surrounding territories. These territories can include smaller cities, towns, suburbs, and even rural areas that are economically and socially integrated with the urban core. Metropolitan regions are defined by the flow of people for work, commerce, entertainment, and other daily activities. A metro region might cross city boundaries, county lines, or even state borders in some instances. The primary reason for defining metropolitan areas is to understand and analyze the larger regional economy, infrastructure needs, migration patterns, and other demographic trends that extend beyond the boundaries of individual cities.

And it’s this interconnectedness that makes metro regions so much more important, in my opinion, than individual cities. At one point in time, even after suburban cities became more of a thing, central cities were vastly more dominant. But today, that’s no longer the case. In fact, in most major metro regions, the majority, if not vast majority, of population lives in suburban cities rather than the central city. And this shift has left many cities and regions very disorganized and without a unified vision.

The Balkanization of cities and the MPO

Cities are unique entities in the world. Up until about the year 2000, most people in the world lived in rural areas, not within cities. Granted that date changes depending on the country. For the United States, most people have been living in cities since about 1920. Still, this rural-to-urban migration has lead to a similar pattern in every place it occurs:

• The city grows really fast

• The city has problems managing that amount of growth (re: housing and jobs)

• Due to deteriorating conditions, wealthier people move out of the city into smaller cities nearby

There are, of course, other things happening in the midst of all this, but generally this is the pattern we see time and time again. For the United States, this all started to really occur post World War II and lead to a pretty stark split of population imbalance between the core city and the nearby suburbs. Between 1950 and 2000 suburban cities grew far more rapidly than almost every major central city in the country. This has lead to situations such as the city of Atlanta which has a population of just under 500,000 people, but with a metropolitan region population of over 6.1 million people. And it’s for this reason that the federal government of the United States began mandating the need for something called a metropolitan planning organization, more commonly referred to as an MPO.

Specifically, the MPO emerged as a result of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, which recognized the need for comprehensive transportation planning in urban areas. The act mandated that federal funding for transportation projects in urban areas with populations of 50,000 or more be channeled through an MPO. This was a significant step in ensuring that transportation investments were made based on careful planning and consideration of regional needs.

But despite the presence of an MPO in every region with more than 50,000 people, they’re often sidelined and governed with very little oversight or no direct involvement in how metropolitan regions are actually developed.

State > metro > city

Portland gets close, but still not quite. Photo by Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash

Currently, within the United States, we have a mish-mash of different governing levels that all have different levels of involvement with each other. The state is at the very top (as far as authority goes within them), then responsibilities get divided up between cities and counties depending on what’s happening where, and then somewhere down the line is the metropolitan region. Counties, for their part, are the only subdivision of a state that actually has a federally determined distribution of power from the state.

But this is all wrong. Cities and counties have an immense amount of power to determine things that actually impact people’s daily lives. Land use, for example, is a huge one. But most large metropolitan areas span multiple counties and dozens of cities, which leads to an incredibly complex, bureaucratic nightmare of an urban area where one city’s or county’s rules can directly contradict the other. This drives up costs of development and stalls progress. A single suburban city has the power to stall or outright stop the development of things such as high capacity transit.

It’s for this reason that the MPO should be delegated power above the city and county and below the state where appropriate. In some places, this actually does happen too!

Here in Portland, Oregon (where I’m based) we have an MPO with an elected councilor system. And our metropolitan region (aptly named Metro) coordinates regional alignment on goals for development patterns, large transportation projects, huge parks and natural areas, and something unique we have here which is the urban growth boundary, or a boundary that stops sprawling development. This hasn’t solved all of Portland’s problems (which has plenty of its own I assure you!) but it has lead to things like the city having an extensive light rail system that many other cities much larger than it does not.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many other examples of strong MPOs within the United States so its challenging to see what could really change if this idea in Portland spread around the country. Minneapolis has something similar but not quite. Regardless, it’s something the country (and all countries!) should consider if they’re serious about governing cities and metropolitan regions in coordinated and responsible ways. Because right now, most definitely aren’t.