This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
Are you sure that Bristol is a conurbation? Should Glasgow be listed? Edward 22:11, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
This needs context and explanations. These surely aren't all official. It looks like an attempt to produce as long a list as possible by stretching the definition to breaking point. Reading a conurbation!
Is this an actual urban area? because the other urban areas mentioned are to my knowledge continuously built up whereas Reading and Wokingham are seperated, and Bracknell which is included in the Reading/Wokingham urban area is certainly very seperated from Reading. The Reading urban population is in other pages quoted as 232,000 not 300,000+. Is there a source that backs up this urban area, as it does not fit the "A conurbation is an urban area comprising a number of cities or towns which, through population growth and expansion, have physically merged to form one continuous built up area. It is thus a polycentric form of agglomeration.". definition. (BoroLad1982)
Also the non-continuation of reading/wokingham, then brighton and worthing (which i admit is very close together while not actually touching) is similar to teesside and hartelpool which potentially has a population of 450,000, and are the birkenhead/liverpool areas not one of the same as they are only seperated by the mersey?
Ok i see. "Teeside's population according to the ONS is 365,323" i know this - what i was saying though, i meant if you look at the close proximity of hartlepool and teesside (which is conncted by industry rather than residential area) it is no further away from each other than the brighton/worthing/littlehampton area. also i cannot understand why the villages of yarm and eaglescliffe and marske do not come under the teesside urban area as they are now connected, or at most a stone throw away. Maybe this will change in the next census.
I agree. As far as I know, there are six to eight UK conurbations but definitely nowhere near the number that are suggested here. I might see if I can confirm the eight or so and give this page an edit.
Samluke777 19:35, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
Conurbation means in this context "urban areas that stretch outside local government boundaries". Morwen - Talk 13:18, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
according to conurbation, "A conurbation is an urban area comprising a number of cities or towns which, through population growth and expansion, have physically merged to form one continuous built up area. It is thus a polycentric form of agglomeration.". This applies to pretty much all the cases here. Morwen - Talk 13:20, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
Should the South Midlands be included on this list? David 13:01, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Should a comment be placed somewhere on this page mentioning that it is possible to see the whole of this area as a single conurbation, given that it is pretty much possible to travel from say, Hazel Grove to the coast without really leaving a built-up area? It's not really generally considered to be a "true" conurbation, but it's not too far away either. Steven J 12:11, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
The same can be said about the Derby and Nottingham areas (BoroLad1982)
On the other hand, looking at the maps, there are several places affixed to Greater Manchester by little stringy corridors, which already makes its figure exaggerated compared to more tightly defined Urban Areas (most notably the West Midlands). 82.36.26.70 —Preceding comment was added at 13:26, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
After much searching, can't find equivilant pop stats for Scottish conurbations. I guess only Edinburgh and Glasgow would get into the list at the moment - but want figures made with the same metholodolgy, not just random pop figures from web. Morwen - Talk 12:38, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
The report can be found here: http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/publications-and-data/settlements-and-localities/mid-2004-population-estimates-for-settlements-in-scotland.html#introduction Maps can be found here outlining the various Settlements in Scotland: http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/geography/scosett/settlement-mapping.html
Obviously a different methodology has been used to compile the Scottish data than that of the English data as Bradford, Leeds, Wakefield and Huddersfield are recognised as a single entity yet Glasgow, East Kilbride, Greenock, Hamilton, Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (all much more part of their urban area than the West Yorkshire towns are recognised as separate entities.
The GRO definition suggests that 'Greater Glasgow' is home to 1,171,390 people, but going by the ONS defintion as used to identify English settlements, that figure would be closer to 1,500,000. Infact, going by the ONS definition it looks like the entire Scottish central belt from the Clyde Coast to Southern Fife could be regarded as a single entity. Glasvegas3987 ( talk) 16:57, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
The Edinburgh entry suggested that the Edinburgh conurbations contains only Edinburgh and Musselburgh. It should probably mention Leith as well. Leith only became part of Edinburgh in 1920 Leith#History. -- Drgs100 ( talk) 08:35, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
What is with the lack of interest for South Wales when it is clearly one of the most densely populated areas of the UK?
Newport is part of an urban area with the valley towns of Risca, Cross Keys and Machen. It is also very close to Cwmbran to the North, which is in turn connected to Pontypool. The Monmouthahire town of Risca is right on the border of the City. If this doesn't make Newport a major conurbation then how can Reading claim to be when it isn't even connected to Wokingham and is even more distant from Bracknell, which is also part of this conurbation?
Also worth a mention is the Cardiff-Newport/South East Wales 'conurbation'. This would be a rough built up area including the Newport conurbation as priviously mentioned, and Cardiff, Caerphilly and part of the vale of Glamorgan. This is very similar to the Southampton-Portsmouth area mentioned in the article.
The only place I can see a Newport conurbation mentioned is Risca. I'll make a note of the Cardiff/Newport conurbations now. The trouble is the National Statistics Office doesn't list Newport as one of the 'official' conurbations, they should do something about that considering they are based in Newport.
This data is very inconsistent. It seems like for some places they have got a compass and drawn a circle around a city centre, e.g. Bracknell part of Reading? Port Talbot part of Swansea? Yet Caerleon is within the built up area and city limits of Newport but not the urban area. They list the population of Cardiff City as 292,150, how do they work this one out? Also, they put Chepstow urban area in South West, when the main centre of population here is in Wales.
I've brought this up on the England page, but I would also like to ask the same question here. Do you think that Tyne and Wear is really a conurbation? It's a metropolitan county, metropolitan areas can be seen as conurbations but, ultimately, they tend not to be as built up as conurbations (ie. there may be slight, but still clear, areas seperating different towns without and clear build up). Whilst Tyne and Wear certainly is one of the country's core urban areas it is possible to travel from Sunderland/Washington to a southern/central part of Gateshead and pass very few (if any) built up areas. It's two conurbations in one metropolis, there are still clear gaps between Tyneside and Wearside - just look at a map. Also, I'm sure not many geordies or mackems would like the thought of their respective areas being classed as one! The two cities are hardly united and both have entirely different identities, accents and dialect - Newcastle being typically Northumbrian, Sunderland Durham. Seriously though, I know this is briefly mentioned in the article (bordlering, multi-centred) but I would like some detailed feedback on what you think. hedpeguyuk 22:20, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Shown as Ranking 39th, this article shows only the population of Sunderland Borough and doesn't include the other parts of the conjoined City of Sunderland, which would give a total (2001 census) of 280,807.
This article covers an important topic of UK geography, but is a terribly confused mess.
The entire first section is completely uncited (in fact probably uncitable) and is riddled with such unencyclopedic gems as "There are gaps of countryside between towns on the way from Liverpool to Manchester, but not especially big ones." It has an apparently arbitrary list of conurbations that gives no indication of what qualifies a conurbation to be on the list, what point it considers a city to become a conurbation (bearing in mind that in a densely populated area like the UK almost any significant town or city will have swallowed up at a neighbouring village at some point), or what criteria are being used to determine what is inside a conurbation or outside it. Is Doncaster really part of a conurbation called "Greater Sheffield"? More importantly, without reliably sourced definitions and data, how are we supposed to tell?
If we're frank the first section is probably all original research based on wikipedians' opinions, local knowledge and experience of looking at blobs on maps.
On the basis that wikipedia articles should be based on verifiable information from reliable sources, that there is very little about the idea of a conurbation that is specific to the UK and that there is a perfectly good article about conurbations in general at conurbation, I propose...
a) The article is renamed "Urban Areas in the United Kingdom" or "Urban Areas (United Kingdom)"
b) It is based primarily on references to the most reliable definitions and data available on the subject - those available from the Office for National Statistics (though obviously it could include major criticisms of or alternatives to those definitions or data if they themselves could be referenced to other reliable sources).
c) It includes a section on the formal definitions of Urban Areas in Scotland and in England and Wales, including comparisons with UN recommendations, the US definition ( United States urban area) and the French ( Unité urbaine).
d) It includes a section describing the fact that some of the Urban Areas identified are strongly mono-centric cities, others are highly polycentric conurbations and many fall some way between the two.
e) It includes a table similar to the current one in the second section, with the major Urban Areas, their official populations, areas and densities, their correct names and linked to their articles (where users could go for more detailed breakdowns of individual urban areas' component parts).
Anyone agree?
Demograph 11:50, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
Surely the only relevant data is what the ONS calls "urban areas". Anything else fails WP:Original research and WP:Synthesis. What is the independent source of data in this article? In what way does it have precedence over the ONS decision? -- John Maynard Friedman ( talk) 18:27, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
This is very similar to List of Primary Urban Areas in England Blackwave...... ( talk) 15:38, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
As I found out the ONS only do statistics, the Department for Communities and Local Government are the people to discuss the make up of the actual areas involved. They can be emailed on: contactus@communities.gov.uk. Dmcm2008 ( talk) 21:03, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
Not sure what User:Fingerpuppet is going on about (responding to me) but the information I have supplied is from an email from ONS who are the ones behind the Liverpool Urban Area > who say they only do the statistics and they told me "ONS are responsible only for producing statistics for the Urban Areas as defined by the Department for Communities and Local Government. If you wish to comment on the boundaries you will need to contact them. Their email address is......." Dmcm2008 ( talk) 00:24, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
The definition of urban areas
Census results are produced for urban areas to meet the widespread interest in information about towns and cities as such, and for comparisons between urban populations and with those living elsewhere. Similar information was published in reports from the 1981 and 1991 Censuses (1), and it is possible to see the dynamics of towns, cities and large urban agglomerations by comparing results from the three censuses.
The traditional concept of a town or city would be a free-standing built-up area with a sufficient number and variety of shops and services, including perhaps a market, to make it recognisably urban in character. It might have administrative, commercial, educational, entertainment and other social and civic functions, and, in many cases, have evidence of being historically well established. It would be a focus of a local network of transport, often a location for industries, and a place of employment for people from surrounding areas. It would be a place known beyond its immediate vicinity.
The current position in Britain is more complex. Free-standing towns have grown and coalesced into continuously built-up areas, and subsidiary centres have developed as suburbs and satellite towns. The process continues with the expansion of business and retail parks. Whilst some historic towns have stagnated and lost urban functions, many more settlements have expanded rapidly to the size of small towns, but without the range of traditional urban functions. In these circumstances no attempt has been made to define an urban area by the presence or absence of ‘urban’ functions.
Approaches to definition
An obvious way to define a town or city is in terms of an administrative boundary. This was possible in censuses in Britain up to and including 1971. In England and Wales, until reorganisation of local government in 1974, the division between boroughs, urban districts and rural districts provided an approximate urban/rural split. But there were serious disadvantages. The boundaries changed infrequently, and often did not reflect the expansion of urban areas.
The local government boundaries established after reorganisation in the mid 1970s, and generally remaining in England, are unsuited for the definition of urban areas because many districts were deliberately drawn up to bring together towns and the surrounding countryside into single administrative units. Although local government areas were reorganised again in Wales in the mid 1990s, the new Unitary Authorities continued the mix of town and countryside.
There are, however, other approaches to defining an urban area. It may be defined either in terms of the built-up area (‘bricks and mortar’) or by density as an indicator of urbanisation. Alternatively it may be defined in terms of the area for which services and facilities are provided - the functional area - including not only the built-up area but also surrounding countryside and settlements, although this approach is not straightforward in many parts of Britain where catchments merge and overlap.
The first attempt to define urban areas in a Census was made after 1951, when a limited range of statistics was published in the General Report (2) and conurbations were also defined (3). After the 1966 sample Census, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government produced an analysis of de facto urban areas (4). But neither of these approaches provided a suitable base for later censuses, and a new approach was introduced in the 1981 Census, following local government reorganisation, which has been carried forward to the current report.
and it goes on to describe various methodologies.
(My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that the "Settlements" article is irretrievably POV and this is the only authoritive definitiion that we can use). -- John Maynard Friedman ( talk) 17:26, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
This is certainly not correct. It needs researching. London, Birmingham and Manchester are using the populations of the conurbation. West Yorkshire isn't though. This is definite because Leeds has a population of 750,200 (2006 estimate), while Bradford has a population of around 460,000. This adds up to over 1.2m for Leeds and Bradford alone. Huddersfield and Wakefield have populations together of around 400,000. Not to mention Calderdale. The population in total should be around 2.1m people for West Yorkshire. It is rightly placed on the list, but with the wrong population completely. I know this is using ONS, but ONS' definition of West Yorkshire's urban area is basically Leeds and Bradford, NOT Huddersfield and Wakefield. They do not believe that these settlements are part of the urban area. However, they are part of the conurbations. Basically, there is a conflict in the name of this article and the statistics. The West Yorkshire Conurbation is NOT the same as the ONS West Yorkshire Urban Area. I'm not going to change it at the moment, but it needs to be flagged up that there is an incorrect statistic on wikipedia. The most accurate way to work out the population is simply to add up the census populations. It is around 2.1m. There are about 2.5m people in West Yorkshire but 400,000 of these aren't in the conurbation.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.212.254.252 ( talk • contribs) 23:26, 16 July 2008
With regard to the following: "The entire Merseyside/Warrington/Greater Manchester area (2821sq km) is not much bigger than West Yorkshire (2029sq km) but has a population topping 4 million in comparison to the 2.5 million of West Yorkshire".
The Mersey/W'ton/Manchester area is approximately 40% larger than West Yorks - substantially bigger than is implied given the context that the population is around 60% greater. It wouldn't seem to me that there's a particularly great disparity between the two areas. Thisrain ( talk) 03:58, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
There's a confusing mess of articles, including this one, around urban areas, settlements, towns, cities and urban sub-divisions. As they probably need to be cleared up together, to make sense relative to each other as well as individually, I've brought the subject up here. JimmyGuano ( talk) 16:23, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
Are you sure that Bristol is a conurbation? Should Glasgow be listed? Edward 22:11, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
This needs context and explanations. These surely aren't all official. It looks like an attempt to produce as long a list as possible by stretching the definition to breaking point. Reading a conurbation!
Is this an actual urban area? because the other urban areas mentioned are to my knowledge continuously built up whereas Reading and Wokingham are seperated, and Bracknell which is included in the Reading/Wokingham urban area is certainly very seperated from Reading. The Reading urban population is in other pages quoted as 232,000 not 300,000+. Is there a source that backs up this urban area, as it does not fit the "A conurbation is an urban area comprising a number of cities or towns which, through population growth and expansion, have physically merged to form one continuous built up area. It is thus a polycentric form of agglomeration.". definition. (BoroLad1982)
Also the non-continuation of reading/wokingham, then brighton and worthing (which i admit is very close together while not actually touching) is similar to teesside and hartelpool which potentially has a population of 450,000, and are the birkenhead/liverpool areas not one of the same as they are only seperated by the mersey?
Ok i see. "Teeside's population according to the ONS is 365,323" i know this - what i was saying though, i meant if you look at the close proximity of hartlepool and teesside (which is conncted by industry rather than residential area) it is no further away from each other than the brighton/worthing/littlehampton area. also i cannot understand why the villages of yarm and eaglescliffe and marske do not come under the teesside urban area as they are now connected, or at most a stone throw away. Maybe this will change in the next census.
I agree. As far as I know, there are six to eight UK conurbations but definitely nowhere near the number that are suggested here. I might see if I can confirm the eight or so and give this page an edit.
Samluke777 19:35, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
Conurbation means in this context "urban areas that stretch outside local government boundaries". Morwen - Talk 13:18, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
according to conurbation, "A conurbation is an urban area comprising a number of cities or towns which, through population growth and expansion, have physically merged to form one continuous built up area. It is thus a polycentric form of agglomeration.". This applies to pretty much all the cases here. Morwen - Talk 13:20, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
Should the South Midlands be included on this list? David 13:01, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Should a comment be placed somewhere on this page mentioning that it is possible to see the whole of this area as a single conurbation, given that it is pretty much possible to travel from say, Hazel Grove to the coast without really leaving a built-up area? It's not really generally considered to be a "true" conurbation, but it's not too far away either. Steven J 12:11, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
The same can be said about the Derby and Nottingham areas (BoroLad1982)
On the other hand, looking at the maps, there are several places affixed to Greater Manchester by little stringy corridors, which already makes its figure exaggerated compared to more tightly defined Urban Areas (most notably the West Midlands). 82.36.26.70 —Preceding comment was added at 13:26, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
After much searching, can't find equivilant pop stats for Scottish conurbations. I guess only Edinburgh and Glasgow would get into the list at the moment - but want figures made with the same metholodolgy, not just random pop figures from web. Morwen - Talk 12:38, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
The report can be found here: http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/publications-and-data/settlements-and-localities/mid-2004-population-estimates-for-settlements-in-scotland.html#introduction Maps can be found here outlining the various Settlements in Scotland: http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/geography/scosett/settlement-mapping.html
Obviously a different methodology has been used to compile the Scottish data than that of the English data as Bradford, Leeds, Wakefield and Huddersfield are recognised as a single entity yet Glasgow, East Kilbride, Greenock, Hamilton, Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (all much more part of their urban area than the West Yorkshire towns are recognised as separate entities.
The GRO definition suggests that 'Greater Glasgow' is home to 1,171,390 people, but going by the ONS defintion as used to identify English settlements, that figure would be closer to 1,500,000. Infact, going by the ONS definition it looks like the entire Scottish central belt from the Clyde Coast to Southern Fife could be regarded as a single entity. Glasvegas3987 ( talk) 16:57, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
The Edinburgh entry suggested that the Edinburgh conurbations contains only Edinburgh and Musselburgh. It should probably mention Leith as well. Leith only became part of Edinburgh in 1920 Leith#History. -- Drgs100 ( talk) 08:35, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
What is with the lack of interest for South Wales when it is clearly one of the most densely populated areas of the UK?
Newport is part of an urban area with the valley towns of Risca, Cross Keys and Machen. It is also very close to Cwmbran to the North, which is in turn connected to Pontypool. The Monmouthahire town of Risca is right on the border of the City. If this doesn't make Newport a major conurbation then how can Reading claim to be when it isn't even connected to Wokingham and is even more distant from Bracknell, which is also part of this conurbation?
Also worth a mention is the Cardiff-Newport/South East Wales 'conurbation'. This would be a rough built up area including the Newport conurbation as priviously mentioned, and Cardiff, Caerphilly and part of the vale of Glamorgan. This is very similar to the Southampton-Portsmouth area mentioned in the article.
The only place I can see a Newport conurbation mentioned is Risca. I'll make a note of the Cardiff/Newport conurbations now. The trouble is the National Statistics Office doesn't list Newport as one of the 'official' conurbations, they should do something about that considering they are based in Newport.
This data is very inconsistent. It seems like for some places they have got a compass and drawn a circle around a city centre, e.g. Bracknell part of Reading? Port Talbot part of Swansea? Yet Caerleon is within the built up area and city limits of Newport but not the urban area. They list the population of Cardiff City as 292,150, how do they work this one out? Also, they put Chepstow urban area in South West, when the main centre of population here is in Wales.
I've brought this up on the England page, but I would also like to ask the same question here. Do you think that Tyne and Wear is really a conurbation? It's a metropolitan county, metropolitan areas can be seen as conurbations but, ultimately, they tend not to be as built up as conurbations (ie. there may be slight, but still clear, areas seperating different towns without and clear build up). Whilst Tyne and Wear certainly is one of the country's core urban areas it is possible to travel from Sunderland/Washington to a southern/central part of Gateshead and pass very few (if any) built up areas. It's two conurbations in one metropolis, there are still clear gaps between Tyneside and Wearside - just look at a map. Also, I'm sure not many geordies or mackems would like the thought of their respective areas being classed as one! The two cities are hardly united and both have entirely different identities, accents and dialect - Newcastle being typically Northumbrian, Sunderland Durham. Seriously though, I know this is briefly mentioned in the article (bordlering, multi-centred) but I would like some detailed feedback on what you think. hedpeguyuk 22:20, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Shown as Ranking 39th, this article shows only the population of Sunderland Borough and doesn't include the other parts of the conjoined City of Sunderland, which would give a total (2001 census) of 280,807.
This article covers an important topic of UK geography, but is a terribly confused mess.
The entire first section is completely uncited (in fact probably uncitable) and is riddled with such unencyclopedic gems as "There are gaps of countryside between towns on the way from Liverpool to Manchester, but not especially big ones." It has an apparently arbitrary list of conurbations that gives no indication of what qualifies a conurbation to be on the list, what point it considers a city to become a conurbation (bearing in mind that in a densely populated area like the UK almost any significant town or city will have swallowed up at a neighbouring village at some point), or what criteria are being used to determine what is inside a conurbation or outside it. Is Doncaster really part of a conurbation called "Greater Sheffield"? More importantly, without reliably sourced definitions and data, how are we supposed to tell?
If we're frank the first section is probably all original research based on wikipedians' opinions, local knowledge and experience of looking at blobs on maps.
On the basis that wikipedia articles should be based on verifiable information from reliable sources, that there is very little about the idea of a conurbation that is specific to the UK and that there is a perfectly good article about conurbations in general at conurbation, I propose...
a) The article is renamed "Urban Areas in the United Kingdom" or "Urban Areas (United Kingdom)"
b) It is based primarily on references to the most reliable definitions and data available on the subject - those available from the Office for National Statistics (though obviously it could include major criticisms of or alternatives to those definitions or data if they themselves could be referenced to other reliable sources).
c) It includes a section on the formal definitions of Urban Areas in Scotland and in England and Wales, including comparisons with UN recommendations, the US definition ( United States urban area) and the French ( Unité urbaine).
d) It includes a section describing the fact that some of the Urban Areas identified are strongly mono-centric cities, others are highly polycentric conurbations and many fall some way between the two.
e) It includes a table similar to the current one in the second section, with the major Urban Areas, their official populations, areas and densities, their correct names and linked to their articles (where users could go for more detailed breakdowns of individual urban areas' component parts).
Anyone agree?
Demograph 11:50, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
Surely the only relevant data is what the ONS calls "urban areas". Anything else fails WP:Original research and WP:Synthesis. What is the independent source of data in this article? In what way does it have precedence over the ONS decision? -- John Maynard Friedman ( talk) 18:27, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
This is very similar to List of Primary Urban Areas in England Blackwave...... ( talk) 15:38, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
As I found out the ONS only do statistics, the Department for Communities and Local Government are the people to discuss the make up of the actual areas involved. They can be emailed on: contactus@communities.gov.uk. Dmcm2008 ( talk) 21:03, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
Not sure what User:Fingerpuppet is going on about (responding to me) but the information I have supplied is from an email from ONS who are the ones behind the Liverpool Urban Area > who say they only do the statistics and they told me "ONS are responsible only for producing statistics for the Urban Areas as defined by the Department for Communities and Local Government. If you wish to comment on the boundaries you will need to contact them. Their email address is......." Dmcm2008 ( talk) 00:24, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
The definition of urban areas
Census results are produced for urban areas to meet the widespread interest in information about towns and cities as such, and for comparisons between urban populations and with those living elsewhere. Similar information was published in reports from the 1981 and 1991 Censuses (1), and it is possible to see the dynamics of towns, cities and large urban agglomerations by comparing results from the three censuses.
The traditional concept of a town or city would be a free-standing built-up area with a sufficient number and variety of shops and services, including perhaps a market, to make it recognisably urban in character. It might have administrative, commercial, educational, entertainment and other social and civic functions, and, in many cases, have evidence of being historically well established. It would be a focus of a local network of transport, often a location for industries, and a place of employment for people from surrounding areas. It would be a place known beyond its immediate vicinity.
The current position in Britain is more complex. Free-standing towns have grown and coalesced into continuously built-up areas, and subsidiary centres have developed as suburbs and satellite towns. The process continues with the expansion of business and retail parks. Whilst some historic towns have stagnated and lost urban functions, many more settlements have expanded rapidly to the size of small towns, but without the range of traditional urban functions. In these circumstances no attempt has been made to define an urban area by the presence or absence of ‘urban’ functions.
Approaches to definition
An obvious way to define a town or city is in terms of an administrative boundary. This was possible in censuses in Britain up to and including 1971. In England and Wales, until reorganisation of local government in 1974, the division between boroughs, urban districts and rural districts provided an approximate urban/rural split. But there were serious disadvantages. The boundaries changed infrequently, and often did not reflect the expansion of urban areas.
The local government boundaries established after reorganisation in the mid 1970s, and generally remaining in England, are unsuited for the definition of urban areas because many districts were deliberately drawn up to bring together towns and the surrounding countryside into single administrative units. Although local government areas were reorganised again in Wales in the mid 1990s, the new Unitary Authorities continued the mix of town and countryside.
There are, however, other approaches to defining an urban area. It may be defined either in terms of the built-up area (‘bricks and mortar’) or by density as an indicator of urbanisation. Alternatively it may be defined in terms of the area for which services and facilities are provided - the functional area - including not only the built-up area but also surrounding countryside and settlements, although this approach is not straightforward in many parts of Britain where catchments merge and overlap.
The first attempt to define urban areas in a Census was made after 1951, when a limited range of statistics was published in the General Report (2) and conurbations were also defined (3). After the 1966 sample Census, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government produced an analysis of de facto urban areas (4). But neither of these approaches provided a suitable base for later censuses, and a new approach was introduced in the 1981 Census, following local government reorganisation, which has been carried forward to the current report.
and it goes on to describe various methodologies.
(My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that the "Settlements" article is irretrievably POV and this is the only authoritive definitiion that we can use). -- John Maynard Friedman ( talk) 17:26, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
This is certainly not correct. It needs researching. London, Birmingham and Manchester are using the populations of the conurbation. West Yorkshire isn't though. This is definite because Leeds has a population of 750,200 (2006 estimate), while Bradford has a population of around 460,000. This adds up to over 1.2m for Leeds and Bradford alone. Huddersfield and Wakefield have populations together of around 400,000. Not to mention Calderdale. The population in total should be around 2.1m people for West Yorkshire. It is rightly placed on the list, but with the wrong population completely. I know this is using ONS, but ONS' definition of West Yorkshire's urban area is basically Leeds and Bradford, NOT Huddersfield and Wakefield. They do not believe that these settlements are part of the urban area. However, they are part of the conurbations. Basically, there is a conflict in the name of this article and the statistics. The West Yorkshire Conurbation is NOT the same as the ONS West Yorkshire Urban Area. I'm not going to change it at the moment, but it needs to be flagged up that there is an incorrect statistic on wikipedia. The most accurate way to work out the population is simply to add up the census populations. It is around 2.1m. There are about 2.5m people in West Yorkshire but 400,000 of these aren't in the conurbation.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.212.254.252 ( talk • contribs) 23:26, 16 July 2008
With regard to the following: "The entire Merseyside/Warrington/Greater Manchester area (2821sq km) is not much bigger than West Yorkshire (2029sq km) but has a population topping 4 million in comparison to the 2.5 million of West Yorkshire".
The Mersey/W'ton/Manchester area is approximately 40% larger than West Yorks - substantially bigger than is implied given the context that the population is around 60% greater. It wouldn't seem to me that there's a particularly great disparity between the two areas. Thisrain ( talk) 03:58, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
There's a confusing mess of articles, including this one, around urban areas, settlements, towns, cities and urban sub-divisions. As they probably need to be cleared up together, to make sense relative to each other as well as individually, I've brought the subject up here. JimmyGuano ( talk) 16:23, 20 December 2010 (UTC)