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The workshop has discussed two major issues from the perspective of international comparability:
Defining Metropolitan Regions
There are several definitions of Metropolitan Regions provided by national statistical offices, researchers or international institutions. Examples of this work include the UN-Habitat, the EU Urban Audit, ESPON and the OECD Competitive Cities. In principle, there is no clear reason to prefer one definition to another. As each definition has been elaborated for a specific analytical purpose, it captures some features of a Metropolitan Region while it tends to overlook others. The issue, rather, is that we do not know the pros and the cons of different definitions nor, most important, the analytical implications of using one definition rather than another.
The first aim of the workshop was to agree on some “guiding principles” for the choice of a definition in relation to a specific purpose.
Measuring Metropolitan Regions
Regional statistics are commonly available for administrative or statistical units rather than according to “functional” boundaries, e.g.: commuting zones, school districts, etc. In some cases, administrative regions are much smaller than their Metropolitan Region; e.g.: Paris, London, and Milan. In other countries (Australia, Canada, Mexico, and the US) some regional data, in particular GDP, are available only for regions that are much larger than their Metropolitan Regions.
Therefore there is a trade-off between the accurateness of the definition of a Metropolitan Region, on the one hand, and the statistics that can be associated to this definition, on the other. For instance, the most accurate definition of a Metropolitan Region may simply have no data attached to it while statistics may available only for a very loose delimitation.
The second aim of the workshop was to agree on some “guiding principles” to choose an operational definition along this trade-off.
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