Framework for aligning New England place nodes to census categories

Communities United States
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I think NECTA is a poor choice for algorithmically determining place=city for several reason including those noted…

I’ve been working on a spreadsheet analysis to come up criteria for place=city on the basis of MSAs. I used the following factors to assign a population center place=city:

  1. If the city is the first listed in an MSA.
  2. If a city is within an MSA (either listed in the name or geographically located within), and it’s within a threshold of size to the principal city.
  3. If a city was listed first in a μSA and was above a certain size threshold with respect to its state.
  4. I adjusted the population of each city upwards based on its state’s population density and land area. A city in a sparsely populated state was weighted higher than those in more dense states.

I then tuned the weights up and down until I got a set of cities that made sense to me as a New Englander and represented at least an 80-90% solution.

Massachusetts

  • Boston, MA
  • Fall River, MA
  • New Bedford, MA
  • Springfield, MA
  • Worcester, MA
  • Pittsfield, MA

Rhode Island

  • Providence, RI

Connecticut

  • Hartford, CT
  • Bridgeport, CT
  • Stamford, CT
  • Norwalk, CT
  • New Haven, CT
  • Norwich, CT
  • New London, CT

Maine

  • Portland, ME
  • Bangor, ME
  • Auburn, ME
  • Lewiston, ME

Vermont

  • Burlington, VT

New Hampshire

  • Manchester, NH
  • Nashua, NH
  • Concord, NH

Algorithmically, this excluded a few places that might normally be included in lists of New England cities. For example, Portsmouth, NH and Newport, RI (which are of roughly identical population), failed to make the cut. Same for Keene, NH as well as Barre and Bennington, VT, and any of the locations in the White River Junction area. However, we may also conclude that these places don’t quite make the cut compared to the city list above.

It also includes Pittsfield, MA, which is questionable to me, but hey, it’s the lead city in its MSA.

I also plugged in a couple places in the spreadsheet outside of New England as a sanity check (and added an additional criterion to catch “twin cities” like Oakland and St. Paul).