The West Midlands is made up of many diverse places, from the second largest urban area in England to some of the most remote rural hamlets.
These places are connected to one another in many different ways through the journeys people make to work, learn, shop or enjoy a big night out, through connections between businesses and their customers, through the housing market or common local identities.
Understanding these functional relationships between places is crucial to ensuring that policies are locally relevant and delivered in the right way.
We studied the evidence about these relationships between places within the West Midlands. The aim of the work was to help us understand geography within the West Midlands based on functional relationships.
Our report, Analysis of sub-regional dynamics in the West Midlands (pdf, 4.1mb), is based on a number of key aspects:
- Employment and the economy
- Labour market
- Housing and land use
- Community and identity
The report shows that there is not one definitive formulation of a map of the sub-regions within the West Midlands, but given the diversity of these aspects, a series of sub-regional geographies emerge based on the issues and data considered.
There's a methodology report (pdf, 193kb) accompanying the main report.
Maps
We produced lots of maps as part of the project, many of which are available to download. Links to individual maps are listed in the appendix to the main report (pdf, 4.1mb) and you can view the full set of maps on flickr. In most cases, copies of the data presented in the maps are available on request.
Travel to retail and leisure
Part of the project included analysis of travel patterns for shopping and for leisure. The headline results are incorporated within the main report (pdf, 4.7mb).
There's a separate report, Defining the West Midlands functional geographies: retail and leisure (pdf, 1.7mb) accompanied by appendices (pdf, 1.5mb).