Thanks to globalisation the scope for shaping policy enjoyed by politicians and also their responsibility for this, plus the economic interdependences have all grown beyond the municipal boundaries.

The competition for experts, companies, investments and tourists is today fiercer than it ever was in the past. In order to be able to meet these global challenges together and from a position of strength, large-scale cooperations between cities and regions are seen as an opportunity to increase the attractiveness of a location and its international competitive ability by exploiting all the available potential.

The phrase Metropolitan Region was coined in the mid-1990s by the nationwide Ministerial Conference for Regional Planning (MKRO). Metropolitan regions are larger than the planning areas of the regional and state planning department and consist of a strongly compacted core area and the environs with which it interplays.

They are regarded as the driving forces behind corporate, economic, social, cultural and technical developments that have a marked national function as well as being strongly tied into the international network of the large urban conurbations. Their supraregional significance results from the constantly increasing expansion of the areas with which they interact and the catchment areas of their professional, leisure and shopping commuters.

Back in the year 1995 already, the region around Munich was declared a European Metropolitan Region along with a number of other large German conurbations by a resolution of the Ministerial Conference for Regional Planning.

The following metropolitan functions are concentrated in the core areas of the metropolitan regions:
 

• Decision-making and policy-steering: the headquarters of important companies as well as of central functions in the worlds of politics and administration
• Accessibility and urban development: hubs of national and international traffic and communication networks, i.e. in the form of airports or main railway stations
• Competition and innovation: the concentration of research and scientific facilities with a creative "spill-over".