Quote:
Originally Posted by Boblobla
Perhaps some of the Edmontonians here can answer this. Do St. Albert and Sherwood Park get hated on as much for being leeches like Airdrie and Okotoks do?
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Or any other major city in North America, for that matter.
Calgary is actually the city that's different because we tend to swallow up all of the surrounding bedroom communities (Bowness, Forest Lawn, Ogden, Midnapore, etc were all separate towns at one point).
Most major metro areas are a collection of a bunch of smaller cities wedged together. This is why when you look at a list of cities and their populations, Calgary is usually pretty high on the list, ahead of a lot of cities that are much larger.
According to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._by_population, Calgary would be the 10th largest city in the US, ahead of San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, and Boston. When the entire "Metro" area is considered, all of those cities dwarf Calgary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_o...tistical_Areas.
So, how do these other large cities deal with the surrounding "leech" cities? Detroit and Buffalo have already been given as examples of cities where the core of the city has basically dried up and almost all of the population (and wealth) lives outside of the actual city, but other cities seem to do relatively well for themselves.