Spatial and demographic dynamics of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan territory in the United States

Abstract Population in nonmetropolitan territory is growing more slowly in the 1990s than the total population of metropolitan areas, but several features of the nonmetropolitan ‘turnaround’ of the 1970s have returned. Our study starts with metropolitan areas as bounded in 1963, and analyses subsequent population change in these areas and in counties added to their expanding fringe by 1973, 1983, and 1993; then we added in new metropolitan areas recognised as of these dates, and subsequent addition of counties to their fringes. For these territorial aggregates we analyse natural increase, net migration, and change in the native and foreign‐born populations. This approach provides an improved basis for comparing population redistribution in successive decades. It reveals that the rise between 1960 and 1994 in the percentage of Americans who live in metropolitan areas can be attributed entirely to territory reclassified during this period to the metropolitan sector from the nonmetropolitan sector.