Defining and Measuring Metropolitan Regions: a rationale (the OECD territorial indicators discussion)

Under the indispensable guidance of Paul Cheshire and Ian Gordon, LSE’s stalwart geographers, the GLA tried its best to develop sound practices for the measurement and definition of cities. I don’t think we ever measured up to the standards of the GEMACA project, and we had many unfinished debates with other fascinating ways to approach the definition of the ‘extent of a city’ not least the Travel to Work Areas approach, which we encountered but to my regret did not fully integrate into our work. Be that as it may, as a result of our work we became involved with other, international, attempts to define the extent of a city. This presentation was given to an OECD expert group meeting on territorial indicators.

This paper should be cited as Cheshire, P and Alan Freeman, ‘Defining and Measuring Metropolitan Regions: a rationale’. Presentation to OECD expert group on territorial indicators, 23 November 2006.

As well as the document, there is a slideshow.