Urban Regions : Ecology and Planning Beyond the City

Settings and forms of urban regions 289

Nomajor surface water body by metropolitan area. Madrid, Mexico City,

Tehran, Bogota, Beijing, Athens, Quito, Johannesburg, La Paz,

Santiago, Abeche

Large wetland by metro area.Buenos Aires, Miami, New Orleans (USA)

Metro area subdivided into major sections by water or greenspace.Brasilia,

Birmingham (USA), Asahikawa (Japan), New York, Amsterdam

Urban region strongly affected by a nearby city.Glasgow, Baltimore (USA)

Urban region with megacity (>10 million population) in center. Delhi, Shang-

hai, New York, Jakarta, Tokyo

Urban region within a megalopolis of major cities.Osaka (Japan), Philadel-

phia, Utrecht (Netherlands)

Urban region asoneofaringofcitiessurrounding a large greenspace.Amster-

dam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague (Netherlands)

Urban region in two or more nations, states, or provinces. San Diego/Tijuana,

Strasbourg (France), Ottawa, Portland, Philadelphia, Cincinnati

(USA)

Urban region in a national district/territory.Canberra, Mexico City, Wash-

ington

Form of metro area and urban-region ring strongly affected by regional planning.

Canberra, Brasilia

Metro area strongly molded by regional planning but now pattern much obscured

by urbanization.Curritiba (Brazil), Ankara, Washington, New

Dehli, Chandigarth (India)

Urban region showing some evidence of regional planning. London, Berlin,

Beijing, Sapporo, Singapore, Rome, Moscow

Effect of and effect on other regions
Acity’s region never exists in isolation, but is tightly linked to regions
both adjoining and distant. The arrangement of outside regions largely deter-
mines the directionality of inputs and outputs, both positive and negative, for
an urban region. Such directional flows in turn strongly influence patterns and
processes within an urban region.
All sorts of things move or flow across boundaries, from groundwater and air
pollutants to wildlife, walkers, cars, goods transported by trucks, trains, stream
water, and fish. The source locations, directions of movement, rates of flow, and
sink locations of these are so diverse that detailed observation and mapping are
normally required for planning. Still, the flows are usefully grouped into three
spatial categories (Forman 2004a): edge area of a region, adjacent region as a
whole, and distant regions.