Definition
The U.S. Census Bureau defines the area as both a MSA consisting of seven Western Pennsylvania counties anchored by the city of Pittsburgh and a twelve county Pittsburgh–New Castle-Weirton CSA with 2 West Virginia counties and one in Ohio. The MSA definition includes the city proper and the Pennsylvania counties of Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington, and Westmoreland. The CSA definition also adds the two Western Pennsylvania counties of Lawrence and Indiana, West Virginia's Brooke and Hancock as well as Ohio's Jefferson.
The MSA had a 2012 population of 2,360,733 and has a land area of 5,343 sq. miles, while the CSA had a 2012 population of 2,661,369. Pittsburgh is part of the Great Lakes Megalopolis containing an estimated 54 million people, while many residents also consider themselves part of the Mid-Atlantic coastal region of Virginia to New York. It is classified as Northeast by the U.S. Census with the West Virginia and Ohio components of the CSA being classified as South and Mid-west respectively. The entire MSA and CSA are within the Congressional Appalachian Regional Commission's definition of Appalachia.
The area is also sometimes defined as even reaching into southwestern New York State and the extreme western counties of Maryland.
Read more about this topic: Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.”
—The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, the first sentence of the article on “life” (based on wording in the First Edition, 1935)
“Mothers often are too easily intimidated by their children’s negative reactions...When the child cries or is unhappy, the mother reads this as meaning that she is a failure. This is why it is so important for a mother to know...that the process of growing up involves by definition things that her child is not going to like. Her job is not to create a bed of roses, but to help him learn how to pick his way through the thorns.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)