Some interesting data from Wendell Cox by way of the New Geography blog… We think of metropolitan areas as being urbanized, whether at inner-city densities or “suburban” (post-World War II development-pattern densities) but, in fact, they contain a lot of “rural” area. A majority of “rural” residents in the United States, observes Cox, actually reside in metropolitan areas.
The use of “rural” is confusing, the demographer says. (Shades of former contributor EM Risse, who often wrote about “core confusing words” — including “rural” — in the context of land use.) Cox uses the Census Bureau definition, which applies density criteria at a census-block level.
By contrast, metropolitan regions are not defined by population density but commuting patterns. If a quarter of the workforce of a particular census block commutes to work in a nearby urban area, it is included in the metropolitan area.
Here is the breakdown of the three metropolitan regions in Virginia’s Golden Crescent:
More than three quarters of the land mass in Virginia’s Big 3 metros is rural (very low density) and nearly one-tenth the population is rural. By the Census Bureau definitions, the Richmond metro is particularly rural in orientation.
To avoid confusion, I will do my best to stick with these carefully defined definitions in my writing. Readers should be mindful of the definitions as well.
— JAB
