Urban areas include both "urbanized areas," which are densely developed areas with a population of at least 50,000, and "urban clusters," which have a population of greater than 2,500 but less than 50,000. For more information, please see the link provided.
urban_areas(cb = FALSE, year = NULL, criteria = NULL, ...)If cb is set to TRUE, download a generalized (1:500k) cartographic boundary file. Defaults to FALSE (the most detailed TIGER/Line file).
the data year; defaults to 2022
If set to "2020" and the year is 2020, will download the new 2020 urban areas criteria. Not available for cartographic boundary shapefiles / other years at the moment.
arguments to be passed to internal function load_tiger, which is not exported. See Additional Arguments.
Additional arguments that can be passed in ... are:
class Desired class of return object: "sf" (the default) or "sp". sp classes should be considered deprecated as of tigris version 2.0, but legacy support is still available.
progress_bar If set to FALSE, do not display download progress bar (helpful for R Markdown documents). Defaults to TRUE.
keep_zipped_shapefile If set to TRUE, do not delete zipped shapefile (stored in temporary directory or TIGRIS_CACHE_DIR
depending on the configuration of global option "tigris_use_cache"). Defaults to FALSE.
refresh Whether to re-download cached shapefiles (TRUE or FALSE) . The default is either FALSE or the value of global
option "tigris_refresh" if it is set. Specifying this argument will override the behavior set in "tigris_refresh" global option.
filter_by Geometry used to filter the output returned by the function. Can be an sf object, an object of class bbox, or a length-4 vector of format c(xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax) that can be converted to a bbox. Geometries that intersect the input to filter_by will be returned.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural.html
Other metro area functions:
combined_statistical_areas(),
core_based_statistical_areas(),
metro_divisions(),
new_england()