The importance of reclassification to understanding urban growth: A demographic decomposition of the United States, 1990–2010

Abstract

An improved understanding of reclassification as a sociodemographic component of urban growth is important for urban planning and sustainable development.However, empirical assessments of the effect of reclassification on urban population dynamics are lacking, especially in countries in the later stage of the urban transition.Using recently available data on spatial reclassification of rural and urban land areas and population, and adopting multiregional demographic methods, we explicitly examine the effects of reclassification, natural growth and rural-urban migration on urban growth in the United States for the intercensal periods of 1990-2000 and 2000-2010. Results suggest that reclassification played a significant role in U.S. urban population change but its magnitude depends on assumptions about the timing of reclassification. The net effect of reclassification on urban change is the largest when reclassification is assumed to occur at the end, and the smallest when assumed to occur at the beginning, of the decennial census periods. While the impact of natural growth on U.S. urban population change is relatively stable, there is significant uncertainty in the effects of reclassification and rural-urban migration.Additionally, international migration is a key source of urban growth in the United States. We find that the places reclassified from rural to urban or from urban to rural experienced the largest changes in population sizes and age composition.

Urbanization and the Paradox of Rural Population Decline: Racial and Regional Variation

“…The interpretative implications are often unclear, even in metro areas that presumably benefit from nonmetro-to-metro reclassification and growth. Jiang et al (2022) recently showed that reclassification boosts metro population growth directly but also indirectly by affecting changes in population composition (e.g., age distribution). In research on residential segregation, neighborhoods typically are based on tract data drawn from the universe of metro counties defined at the end of the period (i.e., a 2020 metro universe).…”

“…The demographic paradox, which we identify here, is that many rural counties have flourished over recent decades, an empirical fact hidden from public and academic view by the binary way the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) classifies people and places as either metropolitan (metro) or nonmetropolitan (nonmetro). The urbanization of rural America since 1980 has meant that literally hundreds of nonmetro counties have been officially reclassified by OMB as metro (Jiang et al 2022; Johnson and Lichter 2020). That growing rural communities are often transferred to the urban side of the demographic ledger is not always fully appreciated or, worse, is simply ignored.…”

Ethnoracial Diversity Across Nonmetropolitan and Metropolitan America: Urbanization, Multiracial Growth, and Uneven Exposure to Diversity

“…County reclassification is known to influence estimates of many population characteristics for rural (and urban) areas (Brooks et al 2020;Jiang et al 2022;Johnson and Lichter 2020;. For example, Wright and colleagues (2022) show that nonmetropolitan counties that became part of existing MSAs have proportionally larger White populations that existing metropolitan counties.…”

Rural-to-urban reclassification and its impact on urbanization in Indonesia: a case study of West Java Province

“…Historically, studies on urbanization have focused mainly on urban areas, particularly large cities and their surrounding regions [5,11]. By examining the reclassification data, it is demonstrated that urbanization occurs not only in major cities and their immediate vicinity, but also extends to regions far [13], reclassification has received significantly less focus than natural growth and migration. This discrepancy is mainly attributed to constraints in data availability and methodological limitations.…”

“…In this era of globalization, rural areas have become integral to the global capital accumulation process, experiencing similar urbanization processes as urban areas[11,12] which have not often been the focus of previous urbanization studies. Moreover, according toJiang et al in 2022…”