Northern California - Cities

Cities

Northern California's largest metropolitan area is the San Francisco Bay Area which includes the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and their many suburbs.

In recent years the Bay Area has drawn more commuters from as far as Central Valley cities such as Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno and Modesto. With expanding development in all these areas, the San Francisco Bay Area, Monterey Bay Area, and central part of the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills may now be viewed as part of a single megalopolis. The 2010 U.S. Census showed that the Bay Area grew at a faster rate than the Greater Los Angeles Area while Greater Sacramento had the largest growth rate of any metropolitan area in California.

The state's larger inland cities are considered part of Northern California in cases when the state is divided into two parts. Important cities in the region not in major metropolitan areas include Fresno, Redding, at the northern end of the Central Valley, Chico, and Yuba City in the mid-north of the Valley, and Eureka on the far North Coast. Though smaller in every case except for Fresno than the larger cities of the vast region, these smaller regional centers are often of historical, and perhaps inflated economic importance for their respective size, due to their locations, which are primarily rural or otherwise isolated.

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Famous quotes containing the word cities:

    The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
    Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
    prairies wide,
    Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
    I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death,
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    Satire is born of the cities it denounces.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)