Starry Eyed Jagaloon
Blairite
Junior Chimp
Posts: 7,835
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« on: July 10, 2020, 03:56:24 PM » |
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Doing California but with slightly different categories that I think fit the state better.
Truly Urban (Red): Alameda, Los Angeles, San Francisco
These areas contain the dense urban cores which anchor California's top two metro areas. I debated making San Francisco it's own category because it's a uniquely small county meaning it's 100% urban. Conversely, Alameda contains suburban Livermore, Dublin, and Pleasanton and Los Angeles contains a rural northern half and suburbs on its northern and eastern fringes. However, if I establish such a high bar then the only truly urban counties would be SF, four NY boroughs, Arlington, and an assortment of other consolidated city-counties. If Cook, IL gets to be urban, than so do these two.
Mixed urban and suburban (Purple): Sacramento, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Clara
California's counties are big and while these contain unmistakable urban cores which would be the leading city in most other states, these four counties contain too much suburb to be placed in the previous category. In San Diego's case, literally the entire metro area is contained in the county and calling Escondido urban just doesn't sit well with me. I came very close to bumping Santa Clara up to truly urban but it's kind of an ambiguous area. Much of metropolitan California is characterized by low rise, decentralized development which still contains urban amenities and densities well above 10,000 people per square mile that defies easy categorization--and that includes the Silicon Valley.
Suburban (orange): Contra Costa, El Dorado, Madera, Marin, Merced, Napa, Orange, Placer, San Bernardino, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Solano, Sonoma, Riverside, Ventura
This should be an easy county--pick out the suburban areas with high outbound commuter flows--but it contains nuance. Madera, Merced, and Stanislaus could easily be put in the midsized metro category, but they have little in the way of an urban core and have high commuter flows to Fresno and the Bay Area. The Inland Empire counties have massive swathes of desert and the standalone Palm Springs area but their populace overwhelmingly lives in clearly suburban areas to the far west of the county. Ventura is split between standalone Ventura/Oxnard and suburban Simi Valley/Thousand Oaks while Orange is in many ways a dense, cosmopolitan employment center which lacks an urban core.
Midsized Metro (green): Butte, Fresno, Kern, Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Yolo
This is pretty simple: these counties are dominated by a single midsized metro area which stands alone, even if most of the county's land area is rural. This can range from Hollister to Chico to Santa Barbara to Fresno, but the character of each county is dominated by a midsized city and it's suburbs. Many of these cities are college towns.
Rural (blue): The Rest (this should also include Kings and Tulare)
This is tricky because for the most part, the West doesn't do populated rural areas. Cities like Redding, El Centro, and Hanford consist of most of the population of these counties, but ultimately, the character of the counties is either wholly undeveloped or agricultural (yes, it's subjective).
The main lesson from this is that for California, along with much of the West, blocking things out at the sub-county level is probably more informative.
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