Regional Overview

Defining the Region

The Buffalo Niagara Region

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From a measurement perspective, however, the Buffalo Niagara region is actually many regions, with varying boundaries. Among the "region's regions" are an array of environmental, economic, administrative, cultural, and marketing territories with overlapping and often changing borders.

Buffalo Niagara's bioregions include watersheds, climatic zones, and specific resource-based territories associated with flora, fauna, geology, and other environmental attributes. For example, the Niagara River-Lake Erie Water Basin encompasses most of Southern Ontario stretching eastward to include much of Western New York except for northern Niagara and Orleans Counties and the Southern Tier counties of Chautauqua, Cattaraugus, and Allegany.

Buffalo Niagara's economic regions include the labor, customer, and resource territories of the area's many industries, from health care and auto parts to tourism and agriculture. For example, the Golden Horseshoe economic region includes a crescent of cities and towns stretching from east Toronto across the Niagara Peninsula and continuing over the border along the U.S. Route 90 corridor to Rochester and eastward.

Buffalo Niagara's administrative regions include dozens of officially defined service areas used by private, public, nonprofit, and educational entities. For example, the New York State Department of Labor defines "Western New York" as a five-county territory encompassing Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, and Niagara Counties; other entities have different administrative scope.

Buffalo Niagara's cultural regions include territories based on social attributes, interests, and ways of life. For example, Buffalo Niagara's rural regions encompass the vineyards of Southern Ontario, dairy and produce farms in Genesee and Wyoming Counties, and small communities in forested areas in the Southern Tier counties of Allegany, Cattaraugus, and Chautauqua. Urban regions encompass a swath of territory including the cities and suburban environs along Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Buffalo River—Hamilton, St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Jamestown—and other high-density centers.

Buffalo Niagara's political regions include a variety of territories defined by election needs and government boundaries. For example, New York's 29th (U.S.) Congressional District encompasses Niagara, Orleans, and parts of Erie and Monroe Counties in northwestern New York State. The Regional Municipality of Niagara is a politically defined region of Southern Ontario.

Buffalo Niagara's marketing regions include territories defined by consumer buying patterns and the technological reach of various media, such as TV, radio, and newspapers. For example, the Buffalo Designated Marketing Area—a territory used by businesses and media outlets to gauge their customer and audience bases-includes eight counties in Western New York (Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, Genesee, Niagara, Orleans, and Wyoming) and two counties in northern Pennsylvania (Bradford and McKean). Many area media, such as Canadian Public Broadcasting or The Buffalo News, have binational territories delineated by the strength of their signals or the reach of their readership.

Buffalo Niagara's metropolitan regions are territories officially designated by the Canadian and United States governments to reflect patterns of urban growth. For example, the Buffalo Niagara Falls Metropolitan Area covers Erie and Niagara Counties. The St. Catharines-Niagara Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) includes the Regional Municipality of Niagara excluding the towns of Grimsby and West Lincoln.

The State of the Region report reflects the reality of multiple regions. Where data are available, comparable, and appropriate for the subject, they are reported for a Buffalo Niagara region defined as the eight counties of Western New York (Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, Genesee, Niagara, Orleans, and Wyoming) and two jurisdictions in Southern Ontario, (see map, Buffalo Niagara Region) (the Regional Municipality of Niagara and the amalgamated City of Hamilton, formerly the Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth).

In many instances, data in this overview and the performance indicators cover subsets of the binational Buffalo Niagara region, either because the topic warrants more limited boundaries—a tourist-based indicator centered on Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Niagara Falls, New York, for example—or because comparable data for the larger region are not available.

In reporting data, divergence from the larger binational Buffalo Niagara region occurs most often across the international border. Because the Canadian and American systems of education, public safety, health, government, human services, and planning vary, data collected in the two nations seldom conform, making comparisons difficult or misleading (Not all data from the 2001 Canadian Census of Population had been released at the time of publication, further complicating the data reporting and comparisons). While the binational region shares an economy, sociocultural character, and physical environment, and while it spans one of the world's most permeable international borders, it often lacks the means to document common ground and present itself as a single unit of analysis.