City Region Article Index for
City 		Website Links For
City 		 

Information About

City Region
SHOPPER'S DELIGHT
 
Shop For:  
Department
Price Minimum:
Price Maximum:
      



In studying Human Geography , Urban And Regional Planning or the regional dynamics of business it is often worthwhile having 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 to localities defined merely to optimise postal services. Inevitably City Regions change their shapes over time and quite reasonably politicians seek to redraw administrative boundary maps from time-to-time to keep in-tune with 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 apprciated that a city region need not have a symmetrical shape, and that is especially true in coastal or lakeside situations (consider for instance Oslo, Southampton or Chicago).

In a German context, the Lander of Berlin , Bremen and Hamburg qualify as city regions for their historical and constitutional status as 'free cities'. In the United Kingdom, the city regional agenda is picking up as an alternative to the Regional Assemblies that were favoured as a partial answer to the West Lothian Question but rejected in a referendum by voters 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 New Local Government Network has proposed the creation of city regions as part of on-going reform efforts, while a report released by the IPPR 's Centre For Cities has proposed the creation of two large city-regions based on Manchester and Birmingham .


EXTERNAL LINKS