Metropolitan Areas

Part of the government series of articles.

Metropolises are large incorporated areas within Vekllei republics, comprising contiguous urban areas with defined borders and populations. A metropolis includes both a central city and its suburbs, functioning as a single administrative unit divided internally into departments that operate as neighbourhoods with their own defined borders.

The metropolitan structure accommodates Vekllei’s largest urban concentrations, particularly in Oslola where several metropolises contain hundreds of thousands of residents. Like municipalities, metropolises have sovereignty within their borders and can negotiate with superior bodies for investment and trade through municipal corporations. The key difference lies in scale and internal organisation – while municipalities operate as unified settlements, metropolises divide into constituent departments that handle localised governance.

Departments within a metropolis function as administrative neighbourhoods with populations typically ranging from several thousand to tens of thousands. They maintain their own local services and participate in metropolitan assemblies while remaining part of the larger metropolitan corporate structure. This allows very large urban areas to maintain the localised democracy that municipalism requires while coordinating at metropolitan scale for major infrastructure, economic activity and regional planning.

Metropolitan borders, like all incorporated areas, are defined by literal geographic features – rivers, forests, walls or berms that physically distinguish one metropolis from another or from surrounding provinces. This makes incorporation visible in the landscape rather than merely administrative, which matters for Vekllei property law where physical boundaries determine jurisdiction.