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.