[1] This concept emphasizes the importance of these functional relationships in understanding urban areas and their surrounding regions, often providing more insightful perspectives than the arbitrary boundaries assigned to administrative bodies.
Using Geographic information system (GIS) technology, city-regions have been mapped globally, revealing significant interconnectedness among urban centers and their surrounding areas.
The Nature Cities article “Worldwide Delineation of Multi-Tier City–Regions” classified over 30,000 urban centers into four tiers—town, small, intermediate, and large city—based on population size and mapped their catchment areas based on travel time rather than administrative boundaries.
The City–Regions System Toolbox (CREST)[4] allows to check out any country's distribution in population access to cities of different sizes based on travel time.
[7] While this was later discontinued as a result of the May 2010 general election, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government did agree to the creation of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority in 2011, with all other proposals and the regional development agencies being subsumed into the local enterprise partnerships.
In 2014 the government of Jean-Marc Ayrault passed a bill that moved away from the voluntary nature and made it mandatory for all Metropolitan areas of over 600,000 inhabitants to become Metropoles as of January 1, 2015.