Northwest Arkansas

Northwest Arkansas (NWA, officially designated by the United States Census Bureau as the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Statistical Area) includes Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, and Bentonville, the third, fourth, eighth and tenth largest cities in Arkansas. These cities are located within Benton and Washington counties; NWA also includes Madison County in Arkansas and McDonald County, Missouri, per the Census Bureau definition.

As per the 2014 United States Census Bureau estimates, NWA is the 105th largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States (501,653 residents) and the 23rd fastest growing in the US. The MSA covers 3,213.01 sq mi (8,322 km²), located within the Boston Mountains and Springfield Plateau subsets of The Ozarks. The Arkansas counties are within The South, a culturally and historically diverse region with customs, musical styles, and cuisines which have distinguished it from the rest of the United States.

Northwest Arkansas doubled in population between 1990 and 2010. Growth has been driven by the three Fortune 500 companies based in NWA: Walmart Stores, Inc., Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., as well as over 1,300 suppliers and vendors drawn to the region by these large businesses and NWA's business climate. The region has also seen significant investment in amenities, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walmart AMP, and the NWA Razorback Regional Greenway.

Metropolitan area

A metropolitan area, sometimes referred to as a metropolitan area, metro area or just metro, is a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and housing. A metro area usually comprises multiple jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships, cities, exurbs, suburbs, counties, districts, states, and even nations like the eurodistricts. As social, economic and political institutions have changed, metropolitan areas have become key economic and political regions. Metropolitan areas include one or more urban areas, as well as satellite cities, towns and intervening rural areas that are socio-economically tied to the urban core, typically measured by commuting patterns.

For urban centres outside metropolitan areas, that generate a similar attraction at smaller scale for their region, the concept of the regiopolis and respectively regiopolitan area or regio was introduced by German professors in 2006.

Metropolitan areas in Portugal

The metropolitan area (Portuguese: área metropolitana) is a type of administrative division in Portugal. Since the 2013 local government reform, there are two metropolitan areas: Lisbon and Porto. The metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto were created in 1991. A law passed in 2003 supported the creation of more metropolitan areas, under the conditions that they consisted of at least nine municipalities (concelhos) and had at least 350,000 inhabitants. Several metropolitan areas were created under this law (Algarve, Aveiro, Coimbra, Minho and Viseu), but a law passed in 2008 abolished these, converting them into intermunicipal communities, whose territories are (roughly) based on the NUTS III statistical regions.

The branches of administration of the metropolitan area are the metropolitan council, the metropolitan executive committee and the strategic board for metropolitan development. The metropolitan council is composed of the presidents of the municipal chambers of the municipalities.

Urban area (France)

An aire urbaine (literal and official translation: "urban area") is an INSEE (France's national statistics bureau) statistical concept describing a core of urban development and the extent of its commuter activity. When applied to larger agglomerations, this unit becomes similar to a U.S. metropolitan area, and the INSEE sometimes uses the term aire métropolitaine to refer to France's larger aires urbaines.

Composition

The aire urbaine is based on France's nationwide map of interlocking administrative commune municipalities: when a commune has over 2000 inhabitants and contains a centre of dense construction (buildings spaced no more than 200 metres apart), it is combined with other adjoining communes fulfilling the same criteria to become a single unité urbaine ("urban unit" ); if an urban unit offers over 10,000 jobs and its economical development is enough to draw more than 40% of the population of a nearby municipalities (and other municipalities drawn to these in the same way) as commuters, it becomes a pôle urbain ("urban cluster") and the "commuter municipalities" become its couronne ("rim"), but this only on the condition that the urban unit itself is not part of another urban cluster's rim. The aire urbaine is an urban cluster and its rim combined, or a statistical area describing a central urban core and its economic influence on surrounding municipalities.