Emerging city regions: urban expansion, transformation and discursive construction

This chapter takes a critical look at city regions from an urban geography perspective. As subject matter, it first identifies city regions that have evolved through the course of urban growth and expansion, representing an assemblage of an urban core and associated neighbour cities and suburbs that are functionally linked. Second, it also addresses the specialization of some of these city regions that host advanced services, political functions, higher education infrastructure or gateway functions, which make them being classified as ‘metropolitan’ regions. Further, it emphasizes the processes through which regions are labelled and thus created as metropolitan areas: ‘metropolization’. This labelling includes indicator-based observations, political manifestations and also discursive representations.