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Originally Posted by eschaton
Just curious about the opinions here on the subject of when to consider, and not to consider, city limits.
When making comparisons across metropolitan areas, I personally absolutely believe city limits should be ignored. Many Sun Belt cities are essentially unconstrained in their ability to snap up unincorporated county land (some non Sun Belt cities as well, like Columbus). Hence when you look at just city population, it can make a city seem quite substantial...until you discover it's really something like Jacksonville (a mid-sized metro which happens to have a city-county merger at its core).
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But then you have other situations in the Sun Belt such as where the state governments of both Carolinas are openly hostile to the very existence of cities and forbid them from expanding their borders, except under very specific circumstances that usually bring in commercial properties but almost never residential ones. That's how you end up with Greenville, with a population of almost 71,000 anchoring an urban area of more than 400,000 people. Add Spartanburg with its population 39,000 and its urban area of about 181,000 to the mix, and, with the other handful of incorporated towns and their suburbs in between Greenville and Spartanburg, that's how you get a contiguous urban area of about 928,000 anchored by "towns" whose population on paper isn't at all impressive. On the ground this takes the form of you being able to tell when you're inside the city limits because all of a sudden the landscaping and architectural standards get better, and there's more art. There used to be a big strip mall on the north side of Greenville that was half in, and half out, of the city and you could clearly see the line of demarcation. The side inside the city and subject to its standards looked much nicer, was better-maintained, and had trees and bushes planted in regularly-spaced planting wells all across the parking lot. The side that was just subject to the county's rules was a barren plain of cracked asphalt and nothing else.