1 Metropolitan areas and regions: Trends and scenarios Lewis Dijkstra Deputy Head of the Analysis Unit DG for Regional Policy European Commission

2 What is a metropolitan area? Local definition of a city City with an urban centre of inhabitants or more Commuting zone: all contiguous municipalities with at least 15% of its employed population working in that city Regional definition NUTS 3 approximation of all commuting zones with at least inhabitants Benefits: access to regional account data (GVA and employment by sector) and other data with annual time series

3 A local definition in three steps 1.Define an urban centre 2.Define a city based on this urban centre (LAU2 or groups of LAU2s) 3.Define a commuting zone based on this city (including check for polycentric cities) IMPORTANT! Cities are selected based on the population of their centre, not total population

4 Short version

5 Detail for the city definition Urban centre –Contiguous grid cells with at least inhabitants per km 2, excluding diagonals –Gaps filled –A minimum population of City –A city consists of one or more LAU2s –City has at least 50% population in urban centres –At least 75% of each urban centre population is located within one or more cities

6 Cluster – Centre – City

7 Detail commuting zone Combine ‘connected cities’ (a city that has at least 15% of its employed population working in another city) into a single destination Select all municipalities that have at least 15% of its employed population working in a city Drop the exclaves: non-contiguous municipalities Include enclaves: municipalities that share at least 50% of their border with commuting municipalities (applied iteratively)

8 City – Commuting zone

9 Future improvements to the method Improve population grid –Create more bottom up grids –Improve disaggregation Check impact of using a smaller grid cell Consider day-time population (jobs), but no EU wide employment girds Consider urban functions, but no EU wide data The two last aspects are considered for borderline cases in consultation with national statistical institutes

10 Metro regions Trends and scenarios

11 Metro regions general picture 247 metro regions 3 equal (almost) a country: LU, CY and MT They contain 62% of EU population They contain 61% of EU employment They contain 66% of EU GDP

12 Population change

13 Productivity

14 Change in productivity

15 Education

16 Employment

17 Scenarios EU-15 Catching up of smaller metro regions? Catching up of rural regions (close to a city)? Slow urbanisation or de-urbanisation? Concentration of unemployment? Urban deprivation? Sustainability of urban working and living EU-12 Growth dispersion or continued concentration in the capital metro region? Metro population stable non- metro regions shrinking or reverse migration? Gap in access to services and jobs between capital and smaller metros and non- metro regions Public investment priorities?

18 Conclusions Metropolitan regions play a key role in economy Present different set of challenges and opportunities depending on the country Metropolitan analysis is essential to understand different situations and trends

19 Thank you for your attention Questions?