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:
“I’m beginning to think that the proper definition of “Man” is “an animal that writes letters.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The physicians say, they are not materialists; but they are:MSpirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!—But the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.... The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)