Drawing the City: Delineating Functional Urban Regions

This paper evaluates different procedures commonly used in Europe for the delineation of Functional Urban Regions or Local Labor Areas. Procedures that analyze all flows despite its significance don’t prove to be necessarily more efficient when delineating Functional Urban Regions, although they overall perform better than more polarized procedures. The existence of relatively small and open FURs is only well delineated by more polarized procedures, as these tend to observe polarity more than selfcontainment, providing important information for the delineation process. Also the lack of accuracy of the less polarized procedure, permits to conclude not only that none of the procedures is more efficient, but also that a comprehensive procedure must have both kinds of allocating sub-procedures.