Determination of Metropolitan Boundary——A Case Study on Changchun City

Accurate boundary information of a metropolitan area for a core city plays an important role in the development of future urban planning and social-economical policy around surrounding regions.The international research progress towards the concepts of a metropolitan area and its boundary determination approaches was reviewed in the paper.Then Changchun city was taken as a case study site for determining its metropolitan boundary to better understand the underlying mechanisms of urbanization process.An index system of six parameters for indentifying the metropolitan boundary,together with a weighting strategy of Analysis Hierarchy Process,was proposed.The results indicated that the metropolitan area of Changchun included Lanjia town,Sandao town,Yutan town,Xinli town and so on.This research also showed that Changchun's metropolitan area would be mainly formed by extending its region along the transport lines and there might be a need to redefine the administrative boundaries in surrounding regions.