Öfugt við ríkisstjórnina.

Í dag og í gær hefur talsvert verið rætt um það að hlutföllin á milli þriggja landsbyggðarkjördæma og þriggja Reykjavíkurkjördæmi í skipan ríkisstjórnarinnar séu slæm, Reykjavíkursvæðið með alltof marga, sjö á móti fjórum.

En úrslitin í Útsvari í kvöld létta kannski lundina eitthvað hjá þeim, sem segjast hafa áhyggjur af fáum ráðherrum landsbyggðarkjördæmanna, og það halli stórlega á hana í þessu efni því að ég minnist þess ekki að lið Reykjavíkur hafi áður farið svona flatt í spurningakeppni. 

Þar hallaði á höfuðborgina. 

Undantekningarrödd var það þegar bæjarstjóri Akureyrar deildi ekki skoðunum með gagnrýnendur ráðherraskipanar stjórnarinnar.

Og raunar er skiptingin í kjördæmi orðin afar brengluð. Það má til dæmis skilgreina Akureyri sem hluta af VBS, "virku borgarsvæði" ( Functional Urban Area) af því að það tekur innan við 45 mínútur að fara á milli Akureyrar og Reykjavíkur.

Sömuleiðis eru Suðurnes, Akranes, Hveragerði, og Árborg á Reykjavíkursvæðinu ef svona er á málin litið.

Mörk kjördæmanna eru löngu úrelt og hefur áður verið fjallað um það hér á síðunni.

Fráleitt er að kjósandi á Akranesi hafi meira en tvöfalt vægi atkvæðis síns en kjósandi í Vallahverfinu syðst í Hafnarfirði og kjósandi á Djúpavogi á nær enga sameiginlega sérhagsmuni með kjósanda í Vogum á Vatnsleysuströnd.

Kjósandi á Akranesi býr við allt aðrar aðstæður en kjósandi í Fljótum í Skagafirði eða kjósandi í Bolungarvík.   

Fjarðabyggð burstaði Reykjavík

Athugasemdir

[Þorsteinn Briem, 14.1.2017 kl. 01:22]

Þingmenn höfuðborgarsvæðisins (Reykjavíkurkjördæmanna og Suðvesturkjördæmis) eru nú 37, eða 59% þingmanna, en á höfuðborgarsvæðinu búa 64% landsmanna.

[Þorsteinn Briem, 14.1.2017 kl. 01:49]

Núverandi ráðherrar og forseti Alþingis, sem talinn er ígildi ráðherra, eru tólf og fjórir þeirra, eða 33%, eru þingmenn landsbyggðarinnar, þar sem 36% landsmanna búa.

[Hábeinn (IP-tala skráð) 14.1.2017 kl. 04:26]

Það er ekki hægt að skilgreina Akureyri sem hluta af VBS, "virku borgarsvæði" ( Functional Urban Area) af því að það tekur innan við 45 mínútur að fara á milli Akureyrar og Reykjavíkur. Skilgreiningin á VBS er nokkuð flókin og hvergi minnst á 45 mínútur. Mjög stytt útgáfa er að til þess þyrftu 15% starfandi íbúa Akureyrar að fara daglega á milli til vinnu í kjarna Reykjavíkur. Og auk þess stór hluti að sækja þangað tómstundir, þjónustu og verslun.

Ferðatíminn og fjarlægðir skilgreina ekki VBS þannig að þessar 45 mínútur eru tilbúningur og bull. Þú gætir þá eins sagt 3 klst. og bætt Skotlandi við Reykjavík. En um VBS gilda alþjóðlegir staðlar og við þá miða flestir.

[Ómar Ragnarsson, 14.1.2017 kl. 16:33]

Ég þarf að fara að grafa upp prófessorinn fyrir norðan sem flutti um þetta fyrirlestur í Háskóla Íslands í janúar 2011 þar sem 45 mínúturnar voru stórt atriði. 

Samkvæmt þeirri skilgreiningu er Akureyri og Eyjafjörður VBS, vesturmörkin eru Öxnadalsheiði og austurmörkin verða í Reykjadal. 

Vegna 45 mínútnanna er ekki hægt að bæta Skotlandi við Reykjavík. 

[Ómar Ragnarsson, 14.1.2017 kl. 16:37]

Mig minnir, Hábeinn, að í fyrra hafir þú skrifað að VBS væri ekki til, heldur alger hugarburður minn. Eða var það "Hilmar"? 

En nú segirðu að um VBS gildi alþjóðlegir staðlar.  

[Hábeinn (IP-tala skráð) 14.1.2017 kl. 20:00]

Fyrst ég er ekki fyrstur til að benda þér á þetta þá væri kannske ráð að gúggla "Functional Urban Area" áður en þú bloggar aftur og segir okkur hvernig það geri Akranes að úthverfi Egilsstaða.

Definition of Functional Urban Areas (FUA) for the OECD metropolitan database

Background
The OECD Territorial Development Policy Committee and its Working Parties have been increasingly called to provide a common base to understand urban areas so to be able to assess national urban policies in OECD countries. A common definition of metropolitan areas increases international comparability of the economic, social and environmental performances of metropolitan areas, adding to what can be learned from the countries’ definition already in use.
The issue of comparability of metropolitan areas is directly tied to the choice of the unit of analysis, that is to say whether these are defined on the basis of administrative boundaries, continuity of the built-up area or functional measures such as commuting rates or other parameters, and to the size of components to be aggregated. Moreover, the accurateness of the definition has to be pondered with a) the availability of socio-economic indicators in a certain metropolitan area and b) the degree of international comparability in the choice of the different parameters.
Against this background, the OECD in collaboration with the EU (Eurostat and EC-DG Regio) has developed a harmonised definition of urban areas as “functional economic units”, thus overcoming previous limitations linked to administrative.1 This definition chooses as building blocks for the functional urban areas smallest administrative units for which national commuting data are available (LAU2 in Eurostat terminology2 and the smallest administrative units for which national commuting data are available in non-European countries).
The methodology used to identify the functional urban areas was approved by the OECD Working Party on Territorial Indicators in 2011. It is applied to 29 OECD countries and 1 179 urban areas of different size are identified.
The OECD metropolitan database includes a set of annual variables related to 275 OECD functional urban areas with 500 000 population and more. It is publicly available at http://measuringurban.oecd.org/

Methodology to delimitate OECD Functional urban areas
The definition of urban areas in OECD countries uses population density to identify urban cores and travel-to-work flows to identify the hinterlands whose labour market is highly integrated with the cores. The methodology consists of three main steps:
STEP 1. Identification of core municipalities through gridded population data:
In the first step of the procedure, the gridded population data are used to define urbanised areas or ‘urban high-density clusters’ over the national territory, ignoring administrative borders since urban cores are defined through gridded population data. The population grid data (1 km²) for European countries comes from the Corine Land Cover dataset, produced by the Joint Research Centre for the European Environmental Agency (EEA). For all the non-European countries, gridded population data comes from the Landscan project developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

An urban core consists of a high-density cluster of contiguous grid cells of 1 km2 with a density of at least 1,500 inhabitants per km2 and the filled gaps3. A lower threshold of 1,000 people for km2 is applied to Canada and the United States, where several metropolitan areas develop in a less compact manner. Small clusters (hosting less than 50,000 people in Europe, US, Chile and Canada, 100,000 people in Japan, Korea and in Mexico) are dropped.
A municipality is defined as being part of a urban core if at least 50% of the population of the municipality lives within the urban cluster.
STEP 2. Connecting non-contiguous cores belonging to the same functional urban area
The urban cores defined in STEP 1 are found to be good approximations of contiguous, highly built-up surfaces. However, not all the urban areas in the OECD are characterised by contiguity in built-up development. Many of them are developing in a polycentric way, hosting high densely inhabited cores that are physically separated, but economically integrated. An important innovation of this methodology identifies which urban areas have such a polycentric structure. This is done by simply looking at the relationships among the urban cores, using the information contained in the commuting data. Two urban cores are considered integrated, and thus part of the same polycentric metropolitan area, if more than 15% of the residence population of any of the cores commutes to work in the other core. This step allows a correction for possible discontinuities in population density within the same urban centre (e.g. natural surfaces larger than 1 km2 splitting one city in two parts).

STEP 3. The identification of the urban hinterlands
Once the densely inhabited municipalities are aggregated to form urban cores, and polycentric metro areas with tied cores are identified, the final step of the methodology consists in delineating the hinterland of the metro areas. The ‘hinterland’ can be defined as the “worker catchment area” of the urban labour market, outside the densely inhabited core. The size of the hinterland, relative to the size of the core, gives clear indications of the influence of cities over surrounding areas.
Urban hinterlands are defined as all municipalities with at least 15% of their employed residents working in a certain urban core. Municipalities surrounded by a single functional urban area are included and non-contiguous municipalities are dropped.
Data on commuting referred to circa 2000 year and are being updated on the base of the most recent data from 2011 Censuses.

Figure 1. Procedure to define Functional urban areas in OECD countries

This methodology makes possible to compare functional urban areas of similar size across countries. A classification of functional urban areas into four types according to population size is proposed:
 Small urban areas, with a population below 200 000 people;
 Medium-sized urban areas, with a population between 200 000 and 500 000;
 Metropolitan areas, with a population between 500 000 and 1.5 million;
 Large metropolitan areas, with a population of 1.5 million or more.

Methodological exceptions
The validation work carried out with national experts has brought some adjustments to specific functional urban areas. These adjustments are described in the Annex of the publication “Redefining urban: a new way to measure metropolitan areas” (OECD 2012), available online http://www.oecd.org/gov/functionalurbanareasbycountry.htm. In the case of United States, the US Census Bureau and the US Department of Commerce suggested adjusting the urban areas derived by the OECD methodology according to the boundaries of counties. Therefore the definition of urban areas in the US already takes into account the following modification:
 STEP 1: identify the counties that overlap with the OECD functional urban areas defined by Census tracts.
 STEP 2: compute the percentage of population in a functional urban area contained in a county.
 STEP 3: select all counties with a percentage above 50% in Step 2.
 STEP 4: drop non-contiguous counties.