| | AIRE URBAINE (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03) |
 | | In France an aire urbaine (literally: 'urban area') is roughly the equivalent of a US Metropolitan Statistical Area. |
 | | In that perspective, a metropolitan area is no more conceived as strictly speaking the urbanized area centered on a city, but rather as a hub of towns and suburbs around a central urban core where people interact and commute. |
 | | The official definition of an aire urbaine is given by the INSEE (the national statistics office of France) as: an agglomeration of communes (municipalities) situated on an unbroken and enclave-free tract of land, made up of (1) an urban core (p?urbain), i.e. |
| www.info-venezia.com /Aire_urbaine (416 words) |