Functional urban area

Eurostat's objective was to have an area from which a significant share of the residents commute into the city, a concept known as the "functional urban region.

[6] The definition was introduced under the name Larger urban zone (LUZ) in 2004 by Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union (EU), in agreement with the national statistics offices in the member states.

[citation needed] In 2011, the European Commission has developed a new definition of LUZ in cooperation with the OECD.

[1] In 2020, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, the International Labour Organization, and the World Bank have also adopted the Functional urban area as their definition for delimitation of metropolitan areas.

Some cities, including Marseille, Lille, Nice, Cordoba, Badajoz, Toulon and Montpellier were excluded from the 2004 list on technical, definitional grounds, such as the coincidence of the metropolitan area with the urban zone.

Illustration showing the difference between the city , the functional urban area ( Milan metropolitan area ), and the metropolitan region of Milan .
Illustration of the delimitation process for the functional urban area (red outline) of Genoa (red fill) and its commuting zone (pink fill).