Why is Katowice so obscure?

[Sol]

I was looking at some European metro area stats this morning, and I was shocked to notice that Katowice, a city which I had never heard of, was the largest city in Poland by metro population.

Why on earth is Katowice so obscure? If you were to guess the largest cities in Poland by their relative name recognition, frequency of discussion, etc, it might not even be in the top 10, but it's the largest under most measurements.

Why do people never talk about it in the same breath as Vienna or Frankfurt? It should be a city of incredible fame, but it's totally anonymous. This would be like if more Europeans had heard of Atlanta or Milwaukee than of New York--this should be the first place people think of when they think of Poland!

I'm honestly kind of angry on its behalf--KATOWICE should be the number 1 focus in POLAND.

[Sol]

I think the obvious comparison is the Ruhr, a similarly polycentric industrial urban area. People don't think of Katowice when they think of Poland for the same reason that they don't think of Dortmund when they think of Germany.

It is kind of wild how polycentric cities like this almost immediately seem like less of the sum of their parts, don't they? Still this is probably a more extreme case than the Ruhr, given that Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Cologne etc. probably still are probably better known even when controlling for Poland's greater obscurity.

[Sol]

I think I will add a corollary to Palandio's excellent post: the polycentric metropolitan area does not exist in the New World or "settled countries" to use a broader term. You can find such cores in not just the European examples but also India, China, and Africa, even after accounting for their higher populations on average. But basically none in the Americans or Oceania.

Bay Area, Hampton Roads, South Florida, Tampa Bay, Fraser Valley, Niagara Region...

Literally so many! I'd be curious in hearing Oryxslayer's explanation because this just doesn't compute.

[Sol]

It just doesn't seem clear to me that what you're describing is different from certain American examples. Point taken on Los Angeles, which I wouldn't classify as polycentric, but there are other cities which basically have the same dynamic which you describe of different towns growing into adjacent cities. Even if one is larger, there's not always the same relation of dominance. Some examples:

-Albany, Schenectady, and Troy in New York
-The Wyoming Valley
-The Lehigh Valley
-The Triad
-The Triangle
-Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson
-The Quad Cities (famously!)
-Odessa-Midland
etc. etc.

I don't think it's accurate to say that Durham's growth is because it's a Raleigh suburb--there are distinct but interacting centers of development and employment. In the Research Triangle there are at least four, and that's excluding some important edge city type development in Wake County.