Metropolis

A metropolis is a particularly large and influential city. What matters is not population size alone. A metropolis draws people, money and decisions from a wide surrounding area. It is home to corporate headquarters, banks, universities, museums and often the government as well. Examples are London, Tokyo, New York, or in Germany Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. The word comes from Greek and means roughly “mother city”.

Why tech companies cluster in big cities

Companies settle where they can easily get staff. In a metropolis, hundreds of thousands of well-trained people live in a confined space. Anyone who changes jobs therefore doesn’t have to move. This lowers the risk for companies of not finding skilled workers. Experts call this effect clustering or agglomeration.

Then there’s the money. Venture capital, i.e. money from investors for young companies, is heavily concentrated in a few cities. A large share of global start-up funding flows into a handful of regions, above all the San Francisco Bay Area. Founders therefore often move to where the investors are based. This reinforces the clustering itself.

A common misconception: metropolis and city of millions are not the same thing. There are cities with millions of inhabitants that have hardly any supraregional significance. And there are smaller cities with enormous influence. Zurich has only around 450,000 inhabitants, but is considered a financial metropolis. What matters is the function, not the size.

What makes a city a metropolis

Geographers assess cities according to their functions. Four areas are important: decision-making and control, i.e. company headquarters and authorities. Then innovation, i.e. research and universities. Third, the transport hub, for instance a major airport. And fourth, symbolic power, i.e. culture, sport and media. The more of these functions a city combines, the more likely it counts as a metropolis.

A metropolis rarely ends at the city limits. Around the core lie suburbs and smaller towns that are closely interwoven with it. People commute in daily, companies deliver back and forth. This overall structure is called a metropolitan region. The Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, for example, encompasses Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund and many other cities with a combined population of over ten million.

You can picture a metropolis like a railway junction. It’s not important because many people live there, but because many lines converge there. If the junction fails, it’s felt throughout the whole network. A metropolis has exactly this kind of effect on its surrounding area, and sometimes on an entire country.

Metropolises in business news and everyday life

In the news, the term usually comes up as a location question. When a corporation plans a data center, there’s discussion about electricity prices, land and connectivity. Data centers are often not located in the middle of the metropolis but on its outskirts. There, land is cheaper, but the data lines are still short.

You also frequently read about city comparisons. “AI metropolis” or “fintech hub” are labels that cities use to compete for companies. Such rankings come from consulting firms and associations and are never neutral. It’s worth looking at the criteria: does it count the number of start-ups founded, the money invested, or just the number of employees?

The issue is also noticeable in everyday life. High rents, crowded trains and long construction times are the downside of clustering. That’s why governments try to counteract this, for instance by deliberately locating authorities or research institutes in smaller cities. Whether this really slows the pull of metropolises is disputed among experts.