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has been referred to as a “city-region” (Dickinson
1947
) and also as a “polarized
region” (Boudeville
1966
).
A defining feature of such a nodal region is the substantial economic interaction
between the two parts with respect to trade, commuting, capital flows, migration,
etc. It must be emphasized, however, that an economic region of this type cannot be
regarded as a closed system or self-sufficient entity, and the economic interrelations
with other regions and nations are typically very well developed. To capture this
interaction between the two parts of the nodal region, we employ the regional
density function. This extends far beyond the boundary of the metropolitan area on
which the region is centered. It will be shown that the form of the regional density
function differs from that of the more familiar urban density function.
6.2.2 The Bogue Contribution
In order to provide an historical context for the analysis, we consider an influential
work by Bogue (
1950
). This examined 67 regions (termed “metropolitan
communities”) for the US, using data from the 1940 Census. With certain
exceptions each region was based on a metropolitan area (a “metropolis”) having
a central-city population in excess of 100,000 (Bogue
1950
, pp. 16-17), and
conformed to the definition of a nodal region at the scale outlined above. The
boundary between any two adjacent regions was identified as the perpendicular
bisector of a line connecting their respective metropolitan areas, so that any region
not situated on a coast nor adjacent to an international border would have the form
of a Thiessen polygon. In view of the breadth of the study this approximation was
reasonable. However, one of the principal objectives of this chapter is to provide an
alternative approach to the regional boundary.
The Bogue study constructed distance-density plots for all 67 regions. These
were collapsed into generalized composite plots based on: (a) different components
of population (urban, rural non-farm, rural farm); (b) different sectors emanating
from the metropolitan area (intermetropolitan, subdominant, local); (c) different
geographical sections of the US (North East, North Center, South, West);
(d) different size classes of central city of the metropolitan area. The findings,
which were presented to good effect in graphical and tabular form, revealed
remarkable regularities. These pointed to the existence of a regional density
function, as the following comments confirm: “On the average, as the distance
from the metropolis increases, the number of persons per square mile decreases”
and “the distance [-density] pattern for the suburban and for the most distant zones
[of the region] are only different aspects of the same phenomenon” (Bogue
1950
,
p. 31).
Isard (
1956b
, p. 68) has stated that of the various writers on human ecology
“Bogue has most explicitly considered the distance variable within the framework
of the metropolitan regional analysis.” To date the Bogue study is probably the only
nation-wide attempt at applying the concept of the density function at the regional
scale.
