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Originally Posted by novawolverine
I don't understand why the definition of urban has become so diluted. If two urban areas touch in a few places on the map, I don't consider that "merging", although it's sort of the first step you could say.
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Apparently you haven't seen the 2010 urban area boundaries. Detroit and Ann Arbor share an 8 mile continuous urban "border". Again, the "merging" is primarily due to the way they defined Willow Run airport as there really wasn't much of a change in the built environment in this area between Censuses. In 2000, Willow Run was considered rural under airport guidelines used for defining urban areas at that time. In 2010, the Census Bureau changed that criteria and Willow Run was defined as urban. The funny thing is that if Willow Run had been defined as urban back in 2000, Detroit and Ann Arbor would have likely shared a single urban area at that time and we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Here's a map of the supposedly separate urban areas, with the blue line representing where the two urban areas share a common boundary.
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Originally Posted by LMich
While I'm of the mind that Ann Arbor and Detroit developed so independently of one another and remain so, and to the extent that I'd have a hard time ever considering it a core county of the metropolitan area, as per the Census measurements or urban area, they touch on "more than a few places on the map."
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The term "core county" doesn't necessarily mean the historic core or the central city. It just means any county with at least 5,000 residents living within a specific urban area (assuming the county doesn't already have a larger urban area.) One example of a strange "core county" is Cass County, MI. It's a "core county" of the South Bend MSA. The funny thing is that despite being a "core county," as 5,000 living within the county fall within the South Bend UA, less than 25% of its workforce commutes to St. Joseph County, IN. So again, "core" doesn't mean "center", it just means where the urban population resides.
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Originally Posted by iheartthed
The bottom line is that the Detroit MSA, as defined today, was once the solidly second place economy in the Midwest but now it isn't. Ann Arbor is irrelevant to that.
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Obviously, you can define metro areas however you'd like. The Census Bureau obviously defines MSAs with very specific guidelines. Under those guidelines Ann Arbor and Detroit fall into separate MSAs. However, if you had any inkling of how things
actually operate in the "borderland", you'd realize that there really isn't an end to one city and a beginning of the other. It's very easy to manipulate how urban areas and metropolitan areas are defined. In some scenarios Detroit and Ann Arbor would share a metro area. In other cases they wouldn't. But the fact remains that as an economic "sphere" there is no separating the two. The funny thing is that back in 2000, the Census Bureau wanted to create a specific formula for urban/metro areas that could be plugged into a computer with virtually no interference. Come 2010, they threw out that formula by deciding what urban areas should merge and what should remain "independent". I understand wanting to keep cities with a historic identity from being swallowed up by a larger neighbor, but isn't that the point of creating the Metropolitan Division back in 2000? Washtenaw County would easily be defined as a Metropolitan Division of the Detroit MSA. In the same sense, New Haven would be a Metropolitan Division of the New York MSA, Trenton would be a Metropolitan Division of the Philadelphia MSA, and so on...
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