The One Minute Geographer: Connecticut’s Urbanized Land
Connecticut is a good state to talk about the concept of urbanized land. Urbanized land or urbanized area is a very different concept from that of metropolitan areas. The combined territories of the 384 US Metropolitan areas take up almost half (47%) of the United States, so that figure makes it sound as if much of the country is somehow “filled up.” But, metropolitan areas are defined as clusters of counties and, as we know, counties on the fringes of cities can be quite sparsely populated with widely spaced housing, agricultural land and forests. Almost every metropolitan area extends out to include counties that are only urban on the fringe closest to the big city.
The Census Bureau came up with the concept of “urbanized areas” to identify densely populated urban areas that are filled up with buildings and roads. Map makers use this category to highlight urban area on maps, so think of them as the yellow areas you see on traditional state highway road maps. You can also think of urbanized areas as the densely built-up areas of cities you could draw a line around if you were looking at a satellite photo of a city. (Try it on the aerial photo of New London below.)
