Approach to delimiting metropolitan regions’ boundary and grading urban hierarchy within a metropolitan region—A case study of Shanghai metropolitan region

In metropolitan regions, the change in the strength of “flows” between a core city and surrounding cities reflects the range of the core city’s influence, while the gravity between core city and other cities reflects the strength of potential relation between them. This article firstly attempts to delimit the boundary of metropolitan regions with the two dimensions measure combining “flows” and gravitation. The former is measured through the flow of people between the core city and surrounding cities, and the latter is measured through both population and gross domestic products (GDP) of the core city and surrounding cities. The hierarchy of the cities within a metropolitan region is classified in order to emphasize the roles of the cities belonging to the metropolitan regions, different from the general way through population scale and administrative level, and is typical in China. This paper uses the Shanghai metropolitan region as a research case, determining boundary of this metropolitan region clearly and classifying hierarchy of the cities within the region. The final results are significantly different to previous work, even overthrowing the traditional system of urban hierarchy partly. It is helpful to highlight the function of cities in organizing the regional economy, the level structure of metropolitan regions, and each city’s relative importance in a metropolitan region, which can be taken as scientific basis for planning integrated regions or urban systems.