aire urbaine

In France an aire urbaine (literally: "urban area") is roughly the equivalent of a US Metropolitan Statistical Area. The name is extremely confusing because in English an "urban area" is not the same thing as a "metropolitan area". In English an urban area is a contiguously built-up area, which is smaller than a metropolitan area, as explained below. Despite its name, a French aire urbaine is indeed a metropolitan area. What is called "urban area" in English is called unit urbaine (literally: "urban unit") in France. An aire urbaine comprises a city, its independent suburbs, as well as its satellite towns and cities separated by some agricultural land. Metropolitan areas in the US also include satellite towns and the agricultural land in between. This reflects the modern phenomenon of long commutes where people may live in towns separated from the core of the urbanized metropolis by some agricultural land, but still work in the core of the metropolis. In that perspective, a metropolitan area is no more conceived as strictly speaking the urbanized area centered on a city, but rather as a hub of towns and suburbs around a central urban core where people interact and commute. The official definition of an aire urbaine is given by the INSEE (the national statistics office of France) as: an agglomeration of communes (municipalities) situated on an unbroken and enclave-free tract of land, made up of (1) an urban core (ple urbain), i.e. the communes of the contiguously urbanized area around the city center; and (2) the communes in the peri-urban ring (outside of the urban core) in which at least 40% of the resident population in employment works in the communes of the urban core or in the other communes of the peri-urban ring. A ple urbain is a unit urbaine (see first paragraph) in which there exists at least 5,000 jobs and which does not belong to the peri-urban ring of another ple urbain. Here is a list of the fifteen largest aires urbaines of France based on population at the 1999 census:

Aire urbaine	Population (March 1999)	Yearly percent change (1990-1999)
01- Paris	11,174,743	+0.32 %
02- Lyon	1,648,216	+0.68 %
03- Marseille	1,516,340	+0.46 %
04- Lille (figures do not include the part of Lille's metropolitan area which lies on Belgian territory)	1,143,125	+0.32 %
05- Toulouse	964,797	+1.54 %
06- Nice	933,080	+0.51 %
07- Bordeaux	925,253	+0.67 %
08- Nantes	711,120	+1.10 %
09- Strasbourg (figures do not include the part of Strasbourg's metropolitan area which lies on German territory, see Eurodistrict)	612,104	+0.81 %
10- Toulon	564,823	+0.69 %
11- Douai-Lens	552,682	0.17 %
12- Rennes	521,188	+1.32 %
13- Rouen	518,316	+0.29 %
14- Grenoble	514,559	+0.65 %
15- Montpellier	459,916	+1.89 %

caulfield railway station, melbourne
ormond railway station, melbourne
pitt street mall, sydney
foster's group
bonbeach railway station, melbourne
islam in the netherlands
kananook railway station, melbourne
frankston railway station, melbourne
hughesdale railway station, melbourne
oakleigh railway station, melbourne
huntingdale railway station, melbourne

clayton railway station, melbourne
westall railway station, melbourne
rade serbedzija
dandenong railway station, melbourne
hallam railway station, melbourne
iaaf golden league
barbara eden
berwick railway station, melbourne
beaconsfield railway station, melbourne
alan ford
officer railway station, melbourne

pakenham railway station, melbourne
adam fogerty
cranbourne railway station, melbourne
prahran railway station, melbourne
windsor railway station, melbourne
balaclava railway station, melbourne
choson sinbo
elsternwick railway station, melbourne
stephen graham
lennie james
sandringham railway station, melbourne

Aire Urbaine

See also