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This is a list of functional urban areas in the Philippines with estimates of population and built-up area as of 2015.

Definition

The United Nations Statistical Commission, in 2020, endorsed a new, harmonized definition of cities that can be applied around the world [c]. This definition is called the Degree of Urbanization or DEGURBA. The method is applied to a population grid and results in a country’s territory being divided into three categories: cities, towns, and rural areas[a] [b]. Cities are places which have a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells with a size of 1 km2 (>1,500 inhabitants per km2). A functional urban area meanwhile, is the city and the commuting zone around it.

In this page the DEGURBA method is used on the Global Human Settlement Layer - Population or GHSL-POP [d], rather than statistical or administrative units. This reduces distortion, as these units can vary in size across countries [a] As a result, the populations are estimates and will not line-up with numbers from the municipal- or city-level census.

Some advantages of this method include: simplicity, transparency, driven by population size and density, and it captures agglomeration economies.[e] It does all this without respect to administrative borders and thus results in a more accurate representation of cities as a whole.

Metropolitan areas in the Philippines

The DEGURBA method is not meant to replace the definitions used by national statistical institutes and ministries, but to complement them.[c]

Currently in the Philippines there are three officially recognized metropolitan areas, however their urban areas have sometimes long-spilled beyond the borders of the biggest city, such as Metro Manila, whose built up areas have reached Laguna, Rizal, Bulacan and Cavite; and Metro Cebu, which has reached Danao in the north and Carcar in the south.

List

[a] https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/degurbaOverview.php [b] https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/degurbaDefinitions.php

[c] https://penniur.upenn.edu/publications/un-endorses-a-uniform-measure-for-urbanization/

[d] https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/ghs_pop2023.php

[e] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/sustainablecities/how-do-we-define-cities-towns-and-rural-areas