The first part of this paper contains a discussion of the criteria and procedures used to delimit functional urban regions in the Federal Republic of Germany. Each region consists of an urban core, containing at least 20,000 jobs and 50,000 population, and all hinterland counties that are linked to the core through journey-to-work flows from hinterland to core. The second part of the paper discusses central-place regions in Switzerland and concludes that these regions are conceptually similar to functional urban regions.
These German and Swiss regions are to serve as the spatial frameworks of policy-relevant and analytical studies of regional growth and change in both countries during the 1960-70 period
