Daily urban system

The daily urban system is the area around a city, in which daily commuting occurs. It is a means for defining an urban region by including the areas from which individuals commute. Therefore, it includes multiple local governments, economies, and demographics. Urban sprawl is the result of an expansion of the daily urban system.

The difference between an agglomeration of an urban area and the daily urban system is that an agglomeration is a multivariate means of combining townships, counties, and other defined areas. It looks at shared economic relationships and other factors. Daily urban system, on the other hand, only attempts to show how far away people who commute into a city are living. It shows how much sprawl has occurred. That is, it shows how people are living unnecessarily far away from where they commute to everyday due to differences in conditions between the regions. For example, Paris's central urban population is 2,125,246. It's agglomerated population is 9,644,507. That's a big difference. Roughly 7 million people live outside of Paris proper, but are easily within the greater Parisian area. Paris's daily urban system has a population of 11,174,743. That's 1.5 million people living outside of what can (at the most generous) be called Paris, and yet are commuting there every day. 10% of the city lives far enough away that they cannot really say they 'live outside of Paris,' but commute there daily.