Cities are often defined by their administrative boundaries or, where available, by their official metropolitan boundaries. These often fail to adequately delineate a city’s true extent. This is especially the case in developing economies where urbanization has been rapid with many cities sprawling in land area, leading them to spill-over, increasingly inaccurate, administrative boundaries.
This process can pose serious limits on policy makers’ ability to adequately address the needs of the rapidly expanding city. Notably, the construction of roads, public transit systems, and other large-scale infrastructure projects may not be efficiently planned and/or built as the policy makers in the different, outdated, administrative “cities” that are part of the metropolitan area may not be able or willing to reach consensus on the best way to implement such projects, favoring the interests of their own jurisdiction instead of that of the metropolitan area as a whole.
In recent years, different methods have therefor been proposed in applied urban economics research to define cities not by their administrative boundaries but based on their actual spatial extent instead. These methods heavily rely on the increased availability of spatially detailed, satellite-based information on the distribution of economic activity (night time lights) and people across space; or on microdata detailing people’s actual use of the city (commuting flows). As this information is often collected on a regular basis, a city definition based on such information would also be better able to adapt to the reality on the ground in the context of a rapidly expanding city.
In our paper we use, and compare, a variety of these recently developed methods to define cities in Indonesia – a perfect example of a country with fast expanding cities sprawling across administrative boundaries. We document the pros and cons of each of these methods, illustrate the different metropolitan areas that they identify in the Indonesian context, and compare this to Indonesia’s current administrative boundaries. Importantly, Indonesia’s distinct geography –its many different islands–, means that our results provide useful perspective on how to best define cities in two very different contexts either of which often characterizes the urban setting in other developing countries: one densely populated and urbanized (as found on Java, Bali, and to a lesser extent Sumatra), the other much less densely populated with urbanization only gathering pace in more recent years/decades.
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