A framework for City-Regions

Working Paper 1
Mapping City-Regions

Office of the Deputy Prime Minster, London 2006

Brian Robson, Robert Barr, Kitty Lymperopoulou & James Rees

Centre for Urban Policy Studies (CUPS), Manchester University

Michael Coombes (CURDS, Newcastle)

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 Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: English City-Regions based on labour and housing markets 6

Bottom-up definitions of travel-to-work areas 8
Top-down definitions of travel-to-work areas 16
Polycentric patterns and networks between major cities 27
Housing market definitions of City-Regions 32
Conclusion 46

Chapter 3: The Greater Bristol City-Region 47

Introduction 47
Economic linkages 49
The SW aerospace sector 51
The creative industries sector 53
Public sector procurement 55
Bristol Port and Bristol International Airport 57
The housing market 63
Service patterns 64
Retail services 64
Cultural and entertainment services 66
Health services 68
Education services and graduate destinations 69
The governance context 70
Conclusion 71

Chapter 4: The Greater Manchester City-Region 74

Economic linkages 75
Financial and professional services 77
The Bank of New York 80
Creative industries 81
Manchester Airport 82
The housing market 85
Service patterns 88
Retail services 88
Culture and entertainment 90
Football supporters 96
Hospital services 98
Higher education 101
Defining a service-based City-Region 104
The governance context 105
Conclusion 106

Chapter 5: Implications 108

City-Region definitions 108
City-Regions and economic competitiveness 109
Implications for economic competitiveness 110
 CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1 The concept of the City-Region has a long history. It has been the basis for a wide
variety of academic studies, not least in the central place theories of Christaller and
Losch who saw hierarchical sets of cities nesting within each other and serving
populations drawn from within regular hexagonal catchment areas at successively larger
scales. More applied policy-relevant studies in England date from the early work of
Smailes and Green in the 1940s and ‘50s and Senior (whose minority report on
administrative boundaries in the 1960s argued for a City-Region approach)1.

1.2 City-Regions essentially comprise a central urban core together with the relevant
commuter hinterland. Their conceptual underpinning is clear: City-Regions are
essentially functional definitions of the economic but also of the social ‘reach’ of cities.
The aim in defining them is therefore to identify the boundaries of those areas in which
a majority of the population see the core city as ‘their’ place – in which they may work,
shop for certain types of goods, visit for entertainment and leisure pursuits, and with
which they identify. As with any such geometry, there is bound to be fuzziness and
overlap at the boundaries of many City-Regions; and the degree of self-containment is
likely to vary for different kinds of activity – whether for commuting to work, shopping,
leisure, or whatever.

1.3 Although successive reorganisations of local government in the last half-century have
never embodied the geometry of City-Regions, the argument for their relevance as
administrative or strategic entities has grown ever more powerful. The increased range
of commuting brought about by greater car ownership and higher employment mobility
has widened the functional area of English cities, as a result making existing local
authority district boundaries increasingly less representative of the real functional reach
of towns and cities. Increasingly, the scale of governance decision-making and policy
implementation in fields such as transport, housing and physical infrastructure
investment have become divorced from the real functional areas of towns and cities.
Realigning the two may be a powerful means of improving the efficiency of strategic
planning for sub-regional areas, with consequent improvements in outcomes for all
parts of the country.

1.4 The impulse for discussions about regional and sub-regional reform, and the apparently
growing momentum for greater regional autonomy in the late 1990s, can be seen within
the context of the extensive debate about the ‘re-scaling’ of institutional arrangements
for governance, and economic activity, as a response to the challenges posed by
economic globalisation. Briefly, the argument is that the advent of globalisation and the
associated economic restructuring have eroded the power and scope of nation-states
and has led to a re-invigoration of sub-national institutional arrangements operating at
the regional and city scales. Together with the concomitant growth in powers assumed

1 Smailes, A.E. (1947) ‘The analysis and delimitation of urban fields’, Geography, 32; Green, F.H.W.(1950) ‘Urban
hinterlands in England and Wales’, Geographical Journal, 116; Christaller, W. (1933) Die centralen orbe in
Suddeutschland, Jena; Losch, A. (1954) The economics of location, New Haven. For a summary see, for
example, Berry, B.J.L. (1967) Geography of market centers and retail distribution, Prentice-Hall.

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A framework for City-Regions: Working Paper 1 – Mapping City-Regions

by supra-national bodies such as the EU, this has led to a ‘hollowing out’ of the nation-
state, and a new and shifting relationship between institutions up and down the local-
global hierarchy. A great deal of attention has been paid in the academic literature to
the growing weight of sub-national arrangements2. Indeed, Scott posits a constellation
of global City-Regions – defined as cosmopolitan metropolises and their wider regions –
as the spatial foundations of the world economy. In parallel with the emergence of
these large metropolitan areas, there is also:

‘embryonic consolidation of global City-Regions into definite political entities…as

contiguous local government areas (counties, metropolitan areas, municipalities, etc.)
club together to form spatial coalitions in search of effective bases from which to
deal with both the threats and the opportunities of globalization. So far from being
dissolved away as geographic entities by processes of globalization, City-Regions are
by and large actually thriving at the present time…’ 3

1.5 While this applies most obviously to global cities like London – and indeed fits neatly
with London’s elected mayor’s vision for the city – there is evidence that such
institutional coalitions already exist across the array of smaller City-Regions in England4.
Cities have increasingly been the locus of strategies for economic development, as
evidenced for example by interest in city competitiveness5; while city strategies are also
measured in terms of their success in attracting public and private resources for
regeneration and development6. Cities are now ‘marketing’ themselves, with an explicit
recognition of the reality of city-versus-city competition under globalisation. At the same
time it is recognised that the myriad social problems of big cities must be addressed in
tandem with economic issues: both competitiveness and cohesion7. For example the
Core Cities group in England has prioritised its twin goals as being to create
competitiveness and to foster community inclusion.

1.6 Whatever the underlying drivers of the revitalisation of sub-national institutions, a City-
Region scale is a vital component for many of the issues that regeneration and
economic strategies need to address. Not least is this true for strategies concerned with
the skills base and with housing, where the geometry of labour markets and housing
markets (which in many respects are essentially coterminous) demarcates the functional
areas within which a growing range of planning and policy interventions can best be
determined. It is significant, for example, that many of the RDAs have developed sub-
regional strategies that are essentially proxies for large City-Region areas. The North East
RDA, for example, devolves some 75% of its budget to four formal sub-regional
partnerships across the region. The logic of city-based functional areas is hard to resist,
whether or not it is translated into formal structural arrangements.

2 Swyngedouw, E. (1997). ‘Neither global nor local: “glocalization” and the politics of scale’, in K. Cox (ed.),
Spaces of globalization, New York: Guildford, pp.138-66; Brenner, N. (1999). ‘Globalization as
reterritorialisation: the re-scaling of urban governance in the European Union’, Urban Studies, 36, 431-51.
3 Scott, A. (2001). ‘Globalization and the rise of City-Regions’, European Planning Studies, 9, 813-26.
4 SURF (2003) Evaluating urban futures: enhancing quality improving effectiveness, ODPM New Horizons Report.
5 Porter, M.E. (1990) The competitive advantage of nations, London: Macmillan; Begg, I. (ed.) (2002) Urban
competitiveness: policies for dynamic cities, Bristol: Policy Press.
6 Deas, I. and Giordano, B. (2002) Locating the competitive city in England, in Begg, I. (ed.) Urban
Competitiveness, Bristol: Policy Press.
7 Boddy, M. (2002) ‘Linking competitiveness and cohesion’, in Begg, I. (ed.) Urban competitiveness: policies for
dynamic cities, 33-53.

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 A framework for City-Regions: Working Paper 1 – Mapping City-Regions

1.7 The closest current formal spatial definition of the City-Region is that based on travel-to-
work-areas (TTWAs), which are relatively self-contained internally-contiguous labour
markets. TTWAs were the outcome of interest, from the late 1970s, in using the concept
of the Local Labour Market Area (LLMA) to represent sub-regional functional areas. A
central aim was that any spatial unit for research and policy-making should reflect the
relationship between labour supply and demand within a local area:

Thus the LLMA should ideally not only represent areas within which identifiable
processes of labour matching were taking place, but often also tend to approximate
other related localized economic subsystems such as local housing markets and
shopping centre hinterlands. As a ‘locality’, then, the LLMA offers the great advantage
of representing a spatially-defined ‘community of interest’ 8

1.8 This latter notion of ‘communities of interest’ implies that there is a strong subjective
element to any definition, reflected in the areas with which people identify, where they
shop, where they visit for leisure. However, in practice, the hard evidence of
commuting flows has been used as the most powerful readily available indicator of the
functional areas which people use, and such flows have direct implications both in
defining labour markets and housing markets. It was on the basis of this work that
TTWAs were developed as the official units for the calculation of local unemployment
in the UK, first produced for the Department of Employment in the early 1980s using
the journey-to-work matrix from Census data. The methodology was refined in 1984
and a new set of TTWAs was created using the finest level of resolution then available
from the 1981 Census: the 9289 wards of England and Wales. Since a major function of
TTWAs was the calculation of local unemployment rates, it was important that the
majority of jobs within a TTWA are filled by residents of that TTWA (demand-side self-
containment) and that the majority of residents work within the area (supply-side self-
containment), and that the difference between the two is minimised. Without these
stipulations, TTWAs of major employment centres attracting large numbers of
commuters would artificially deflate unemployment rates while conversely
unemployment rates in predominantly dormitory towns would be inflated. Since TTWAs
were used in policy design, it was also important that they should be as self-contained
as possible so that government interventions should benefit local residents in areas with
the greatest need rather than in-commuters

1.9 These considerations influenced the set of requirements for the design of TTWAs. The
first was that a minimum of 75 percent of the journey-to-work trips to and from any
TTWA both started and ended within the area. The minimum size of each TTWA was a
resident workforce of 3,500; whilst a size/self-containment trade-off was invoked so that
in areas with a resident workforce greater than 20,000, self-containment was reduced to
70 percent. The areas also had to be internally contiguous. The TTWAs currently in use
were calculated from the 1991 Census9.

1.10 Much of the methodological approach to the definition of City-Regions was based on
research from Newcastle’s Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies
(CURDS) in the early 1980s. Their attempt to define cities as self-contained functional
entities resulted in a framework of 228 urban centres and the allocation of the whole of

8 Coombes, M.G. Green, A.E. and Owen, D.W. (1988) “Substantive issues in the definition of ‘localities’: evidence
from sub-group Local Labour Market Areas in the West Midlands” Regional Studies, 22, 304.
9 Office for National Statistics (1998) 1991-based Travel-to-Work Areas Office for National Statistics, London.

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Britain between each of these centres as their ‘functional regions’. Recognising that the
functional regions themselves produced under-bounded definitions of the metropolitan
areas, they proposed twenty ‘metropolitan regions’ by aggregating functional regions
that were closely linked to each other by commuting flows10.

1.11 As noted above, travel-to-work is only one of a range of possible definitions of the City-
Region concept. Since the linkages between cores and hinterlands vary in terms of
different functions, this working paper explores five different approaches to the
definition of City-Regions:

1. Labour-market definitions
The most commonly used approach is to focus on labour markets, as measured by
journey-to-work. This is the aim of Chapter 2 of the paper which explores TTW areas
for England as a whole. Given the availability of Census data on travel-to-work flows in
2001, there is considerable national information on which to examine the concept in
some detail.

2. Housing-market definitions
City-Regions can also be defined as those areas in which households search for
residential locations. This implies that house prices within such areas would move
roughly in tandem. In theory, there is a close relationship between labour-market and
housing-market areas since both are in principle strongly determined by commuting
flows (at least for those households that are economically active). In practice, however,
the search areas used by households making residential location decisions tend to be
strongly influenced by their ‘mental maps’ of areas with which they are familiar.
Residential moves within a labour market area consequently tend to be restricted to
relatively short distances. Housing-market areas are therefore generally smaller than
labour-market areas; for example, they frequently differentiate between sectors radiating
out from core urban areas, so that house prices and the balance of supply and demand
may be differentiated within wider labour-market areas.

1.12 Other bases for defining City-Regions are more difficult to explore since (with the
exception of household mobility data for 2000-01) there are no generally available
national data. Hence in Chapters three and four, two case studies are used to explore
three further definitions:

3. Economic activity-based definitions

While access to labour markets is a key element of business performance, other aspects
of the City-Region may be highly significant for economic competitiveness. The richness
of the surrounding area in terms of potential links other businesses and business
services may be important in terms of the supply chains and procurement activities
of firms. In principle this would seem to be an element of growing importance as
knowledge-based activities come to play an ever more significant role in economic
activity. It may also be that some aspects on the demand side are also relevant to the
functioning of City-Regions. However, the difficulty in exploring either the supply or
demand side is that there is a dearth of relevant data.

10 Champion et al, (1983) ‘A new definition of cities’, Town and Country Planning, 52, 305-7.

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4. Service-district definitions
Service areas demarcate those regions from which users of city-based goods and
services are drawn. Central place theory postulated an elegant model of settlements in
which customers use their nearest available service so that a large number of places
offer a restricted array of frequently-used services and are nested within progressively
smaller numbers of ‘higher-order’ settlements which offer increasingly wide arrays of
more specialised services. While the geometrical patterns of central place theory have
little potency today – given changes in service provision and increased mobility – the
underlying principle of frequency of use and distance travelled still has some potency.
City-Regions based on higher-level services can therefore be defined in terms of the use
of services such as major hospitals, theatres and concert halls, major shopping centres,
international airports and the like.

5. Administrative definitions
Administrative regions can be considered a subset of service districts. While their
boundaries are formal and ‘artificial’ they are functional areas in so far as services and
strategies are developed within the defined boundaries. Some of the administrative
areas are formal – for example, the structures of local authorities, agencies such as
police, health authorities, learning and skills councils and the like, quangos, etc. – some
are informal and based on non-statutory partnerships.

1.13 The latter three approaches to defining City-Regions are explored in the contexts of the
two exemplar areas of Greater Bristol and Greater Manchester. The case study areas
were chosen in part to select areas two regions with different levels of economic
prosperity and to use very different ‘conurbations’, one with a large and complex multi-
centred settlement pattern and the other a smaller and somewhat more mono-centric
settlement.