"Here Are the Real Boundaries of American Metropolises, Decided by an Algorithm"
I thought this article that I stumbled across was neat and wanted to share it.
Here Are the Real Boundaries of American Metropolises, Decided by an Algorithm
How is the U.S. actually split geographically?
by Sarah Laskow November 30, 2016
When we think about where we live, usually our ideas start with political boundarieswed say we live in a particular state, city, or town. Ask about a neighborhood, sports team loyalties, or regions not defined by borders, though, and it might get a little fuzzier. In densely settled places like the East Coast, sprawl can make it hard to draw lines around places, too. Where in New Jersey does the New York City region end and the Philadelphia region begin?
These larger urban areas are sometimes called megaregions, and in a new paper, published in PLOS ONE, Garrett Dash Nelson, a historical geographer from Dartmouth, and Alasdair Rae, an urban analyst from the University of Sheffield, teamed up to identify them across the United States, using commuting data and a computational algorithm.
Essentially, they used data describing more than 4 million commutes to look at how small units of placecensus tractsare connected into much larger units of place. One of the results from their algorithm is the map above, which shows how the country is divided into economically entwined regions that dont conform to city or state boundaries. Pittsburghs region spills into Ohio and West Virginia; Denvers tips over the border into Wyoming; and Oklahoma Citys reaches into Missouri and Arkansas.
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/here-are-the-real-boundaries-of-american-metropolises-decided-by-an-algorithm