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Conurbation vs Agglomeration

12K views 25 replies 13 participants last post by  windom 
#1 · (Edited)
Obviously a city is urban in nature, but a major inconsistency is in how we define the city. An agglomeration, the urban area surrounding a dominant core, is an accurate definition of a city. It is also obvious that a city can contain multiple centres. London, for example, has the West End for shopping, The City as a financial district, Canary Wharf as a secondary financial district, etc. If, however, no centre is sufficiently dominant over the surrounding centres then the urban area ceases to be a agglomeration (read city) and becomes an conurbation (read multiple cities side by side).

Question: At what point does a conurbation cease to be a conurbation and become an agglomeration? (in other words how do you differentiate between a city and a cluster of cities?)
 
#3 ·
I think his question is still legit. Based on what you are saying, the Paris region would be a conurbatoin since separate multiple cities have over time merged to become a single urban area. Yet I've never heard it called a conurbation, just an agglomeration. So maybe your defintion is a bit to simplified and needs a little more to distinguish it from a conurbation. No? Maybe a conurbation is more like the Dallas-Ft Worth metro area, where 2 "separate" and "dominant" cities have merged to become a single urban area. Or a conurbation is more like the various Dutch cities that along with Amsterdam have almost merged together and interact tightly, like the various cities in the U.S. Northeast that although not continuous, are very close and interact very closely. Maybe?
 
#4 ·
That's why I said "of a certain size". I actually had places like Dallas-Ft Worth, L.A. or the Bay Area in mind.
I never said Irwell's question wasn't legit. My point was that he got the two terms mixed up and that the they aren't mutually exclusive, which I was trying to explain in my post.
I think a better way to put the question is "at what point does an area cease to be [more or less] monocentric and becomes polycentric?"
 
#12 ·
I think the answer is simple. Europe or the US, the person would say the local municipality if he's talking to someone in the metro area or region...would most likely say Phoenix if he's in the opposite end of Arizona or the Southwest, and would certainly say Phoenix to someone from another state or country. If the conversation deepens a bit, i.e. where in Phoenix, he'll say, Oh, some suburb or nearby town of Phoenix.
 
#14 ·
^^ That's purely historical. Look at how Stockport is still seperate from Manchester despite Manchester completely growing around Stockport (except when considering greater Manchester), or Watford and London being considered seperate entities despite being joined at the hip (even in terms of Greater London).

These towns/cities are historically very seperate, at least Bad Homburg is seperated by a green belt making the distinction slightly more clear.
 
#15 · (Edited)
Historically separate, that maybe true. But we don't live in the 1450's.

Here is Bad Homburg and Frankfurt. The center of Bad Homburg is where the brown church is near the center of the photo (directly
under the TV tower). You can see Frankfurt behind it. The houses in the foreground are the last suburbs before the Taunus mountains
where the photo was taken (which are a bit like your Waitakere ranges in Auckland, mostly a forested area) There are some green
fields in between the two if you take a direct straight line. But if you follow the normal roads it's urban pretty much all the way.

(Photo from Wikipedia) Scroll >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


By the way, it's not only Europe. I know people from Parramatta in Sydney that would tell any Australian they're from Parramatta and
not Sydney. It's just that when they are talking to people from the other side of the planet who obviously have never heard of
Parramatta, they would just say Sydney.
 
#16 ·
IMO a conurbation is a number of technically separate adjacent urban/agglomerated areas that are so close together and so little rural separating them, that there is an argument for combining them into a single urban area.

See Hamilton-Toronto-Oshawa, LA-San Bernardino-Riverside, etc.
 
#17 ·
I think a conurbation would be the joining of significantly sized formerly separate areas, into one region, whereas an agglomeration is when their is a main city surrounded by smaller cities that only exist because of the larger centre, but are still of a significant size. A prime example is Hamilton to Toronto and Mississauga to Toronto. Hamilton CMA has 600,000 people or so. If they were to join it`d be a conurbation, whereas, Mississauga, even though larger with 700,000, only exists because of the larger Toronto, so its part of an agglomeration. I think that makes sense, it made sense in my head, when I was thinking about it.
 
#21 ·
OK, I'll take an example from my home city to check how you'd classify it:

( Ashton ) | Droylsden | [ MANCHESTER ]

They started off as three places, Ashton being an old market town, Droylsden being a collection of mills built in what was a tiny village, Manchester being the distribution centre. Ashton and Droylsden gained multiple mills which produced cotton goods. They bought their cotton from Manchester and sold their end products in Manchester. The area became more and more urban and by about 1850 all three were completely joined together. The mills no longer exist and people commute to banks, etc. in the city centre.

Would you consider that either Droylsden or Ashton are now a part of Manchester?

For an idea of scale, here is a rough idea of how far Ashton is from the city centre:



(if it affects your decision, that thing that looks like a hill on the left hand side is actually a building site)
 
#22 ·
conurbation is an urban area which doesn't have one centre, no single dominant city, which other may be called a suburbs of. Prime example of conurbations are Rhine-ruhr area in Germany, Randstad in Netherlands and Upper silesia in Poland.
 
#26 · (Edited)
Maybe part of a conurbation becomes part of the main agglomeration when one of the small citiers of the conurbation unite to the main city by nearby neighborhoods.

But if the union occurs between two small towns of the conurbation but apart from the main agglomeration, it' another smaller agglomeration.

BTW, the phenomenon of polycentric cities is not exclusive of former or current conurbations, in some cases a municipality can allow some "sub-centres" or commercial areas in the city proper, just like here in Bogotá, where besides the Downtown we have the following sub-centres, most of them formed by gradual conversion of strategic residential areas into commercial ones: Chapinero (formerly another town until the 1930s), Restrepo, Chicó, Siete de Agosto, Avenida Chile (current financial zone), Venecia, Ciudad Kennedy and Las Ferias. And these zones are currently even more important than the commercial zones of the towns adjoined politically to the District of Bogotá in 1954: Usme, Bosa, Fontibón, Engativá, Suba and Usaquén (named clockwise from South to North).

Now Bogota also has a conurbation with Soacha.
 
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