We've long focused on cities and towns, strictly defined by municipal boundaries, for everything from statistics about growth and change to decisions about development and services.
Benfield argues that municipal boundaries are irrelevant for everything from people's daily patterns to natural processes, and in some cases our adherence to them leads to misinformation and poor decisions.
We instead ought to pay attention to the regional and neighborhood-scale boundaries that matter: development decisions are most appropriately handled at the neighborhood scale; environmental considerations like runoff and pollution ignore political boundaries and ought to be tackled regionally.
