Functional Urban Areas: an effort of determination of economic influence of Greek urban centres

Abstract

Although more than half of world’s population lives in urban settlements, there is neither a commonly accepted definition of what constitutes an urban area, nor a commonly accepted methodology to designate city limits. Conventional approaches place emphasis on morphological characteristics perceiving a city as the geographical area of high densities of population, employment or built-up space, whereas more contemporary ones focus on functional characteristics seeing cities as nodes of flows of capital, information, goods and people. On these grounds, functional urban areas extend beyond administrative or planning city-boundaries to incorporate adjacent settlements upon which an urban core exerts economic influence. The current paper attempts to assess the functional urban areas (FUAs) of all major Greek cities. To that end, two techniques are employed. The first defines FUAs with reference to actual labour commuting taking place on a daily basis, whereas the second places emphasis on potential commuting, that is the distance that workers can travel daily to go from home to work and back.