Metropolitan regions in Germany


There are eleven metropolitan regions in Germany consisting of the country's most densely populated cities and their catchment areas. They represent Germany's political, commercial and cultural centres. The eleven metropolitan regions in Germany were organised into political units for planning purposes.
Based on a narrower definition of metropolises commonly used to determine the metropolitan status of a given city, only four cities in Germany surpass the threshold of at least one million inhabitants within their administrative borders: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne.
For urban centres outside metropolitan areas that are a similar focal point for their region, but on a smaller scale, the concept of the Regiopolis and the related concepts of regiopolitan area or regio were introduced by urban and regional planning professors in 2006.

Metropolitan regions

Sorted alphabetically:
  1. Berlin Metropolitan Region
  2. Bremen/Oldenburg Metropolitan Region
  3. Central German Metropolitan Region
  4. Frankfurt/Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region
  5. Hamburg Metropolitan Region
  6. Hannover-Braunschweig-Göttingen-Wolfsburg Metropolitan Region
  7. Munich Metropolitan Region
  8. Nuremberg Metropolitan Region
  9. Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region
  10. Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region
  11. Stuttgart Metropolitan Region

    Big five

The five most important regions, collectively often called the "Big Five", are frequently compared with other European metropolitan regions in terms of investment and market development. They are :
Hamburg, Berlin, the polycentric Ruhr-Düsseldorf-Cologne region, Frankfurt and Munich. The Globalization and World Cities Study Group considers Frankfurt an "α" global city, whereas the others are classified as "β" global cities.
Each of them forms types of clusters and achieves varying levels of performance in areas such as business activity, human capital, information and technology exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement.