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    [OC] How the U.S. Census Bureau defines the Chicago metro area (2020)
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    [OC] How the U.S. Census Bureau defines the Chicago metro area (2020)

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    1. JeromesNiece on

      Data source: U.S. Census Bureau, [2020 Tiger/Line Shapefiles](https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/index.php)

      Tools used: Python code written with assistance by Claude Code (Sonnet 5). Primary libraries used: GeoPandas, Shapely, pyproj, pandas, Matplotlib.

      2020 was used rather than more recent data because the analysis was done on the census block level, only available from decennial censuses.

    2. yuccu on

      Interesting they count Jasper and Newton in Indiana but not Kankakee in Illinois, especially considering a sizable portion of their employee base comes from “Chicagoland.”

    4. midasear on

      I can’t help but wonder how many people maintain their residence somewhere on the southwest corner of Lake Michigan.

    6. meanie_ants on

      My favorite part of this is the lake part and that’s saying something because the other bits are cool too.

    8. AssocProfPlum on

      Feels weird calling Joliet a suburb, but it’s really splitting hairs. Funny how they just decided to say “nah” to including Elburn lol, and they have a metra station! At least it kinda makes sense with Woodstock based on distance and how rural it is between it and crystal lake

    9. Ike358 on

      This is why it irritates me whenever people insist on using metropolitan areas for statistics rather than cities. “Cities are arbitrary!!!” OK, and metropolitan areas aren’t? At least cities are actually real

    10. pfkelly5 on

      As someone from Aurora. I would not consider half of Kane and all of Dekalb to be Chicagoland. Chicagoland ends once 88 turns into 2 lanes

    14. Satherian on

      As someone who lived in part of the orange area, it sucked. It’s not remote enough for good nature walks and it’s not dense enough for good city walks