2024.12.31 Areas of Massachusetts: overview

This is one article in a series. Click for a table of contents of the full series. The table will be updated with links as the articles are published.

Here we go with yet another Massachusetts map! This is the one I’ve spent the most time on yet by far. I was inspired to start on it at the end of March 2024 and have been working on it off and on ever since. This is a map of local areas of the state, bridging a gap in scale between individual municipalities on one hand and large regions of the state on the other, and with each area being internally cohesive in some way. The criteria for cohesiveness are discussed below the map.

You can resize the map and toggle map layers with the controls below. The areas’ colors blur into each other; the intent thereof is to emphasize that these are by no means hard and fast definitions. After all, in reality, a given town or parts of it may easily be considered part of two or more areas, and the perceptual transition from one area to the next may be gradual and/or ambiguous.

Note that, when you’re viewing the map on a non-touchscreen computer and the map is zoomed in, you’ll need to use the scrollbar at the bottom of the map to pan horizontally, or use shift + mouse scroll wheel. I’d like at some point to make it possible to move around the map by clicking and dragging.

Read on below the map for more on how I defined and named the areas, what inspired the map, and further observations.

Inspiration

The direct inspiration for this map was a Boston Globe column by Billy Baker, published on March 29, 2024, which asks: what exactly constitutes the North Shore of Massachusetts? It explores the various parameters of the question: does the North Shore only include towns directly on the coast? How far up and down the coast? If inland towns are included, just how far inland do you have to go before you’re just in the northern suburbs of Boston and no longer the North Shore? Are the towns at the mouth of the Merrimack part of the Merrimack Valley or the North Shore — or both?

The column also features a really fun map by Baker and Ally Rzesa that groups the towns of North Shore and adjacent areas by various humorous characteristics. In addition, lots of commenters offer various opinions. No consensus is reached.

This sort of thing is like catnip to me. The questions raised in the column, and the areas shown on the accompanying map, started me down this months-long (and ongoing) rabbit hole of thinking about areas of the state in general.

Criteria for defining areas

Ground rules

First, here are the ground rules I’ve used. They’re intended to keep the area definitions as simple as possible, even where in reality it would make more sense not to follow them:

The areas must not overlap at all.
However, I’m working on an alternative version of the area definitions where they do overlap. This is more complex but certainly seems to reflect reality more closely. I want to add this version as more layers of the above map — but no promises on when that will be.
Each municipality has to belong to a single area, not be split up among multiple areas.
Areas are wholly contained within Massachusetts; settlements in neighboring states are not taken into account.

Cohesion

Following are criteria I’ve used for judging cohesion of areas. Where a group of two or more adjacent municipalities has at least some of the following characteristics, it makes sense to include them in one area. Unsurprisingly, the criteria often conflict with each other, so I had to use my judgment and have made lots and lots of adjustments as different criteria have come to seem more or less important in particular locations.

Relative physical connectivity: are the towns more connected to each other, mainly by local roads, than to surrounding towns, and less separated by natural or artificial boundaries (mountain ridges, water bodies, forests, highways) from each other than from surrounding towns?
I looked at literally every town boundary in the state in this regard, and in order to keep track of my observations, I created the borders "Classified by Connectivity" layer that’s included on this map. Note the key at the bottom left when that layer is selected: black means no road connections, then lighter shades of gray indicate more and more connections, up through near-white, which indicates pretty much continuous urban fabric.
Because these area definitions don’t take surrounding states into account, only town boundaries interior to Mass. are classified.
Clustering of settlements: are population centers within the group of towns closer to each other than to those of surrounding towns?
Consistent population density and/or land use patterns.
Unimodality: the group of towns has at most one strong population density peak.
Being grouped together in any already-established areas, e.g. the sections of Cape Cod.
Belonging to the same regional school district, since this ostensibly allows people in different towns to get to know each other better and build more of an inter-municipal community than they might otherwise.
Being in the coverage area of the same local chamber of commerce. These are useful for indicating existing notions of local areas.

Scale/extents

Other criteria I’ve used for defining the areas relate to scale, and they’re perhaps more personal preferences of mine than the above cohesion criteria:

The areas should have somewhat consistent land area. As noted in the intro, my intent is that the areas be bigger than individual towns and smaller than regions.
Each area ideally contains at least four municipalities. All areas except Nantucket and Outer South Shore contain at least three towns; four of the areas contain three towns exactly.
Areas should be somewhat compact/round when possible, rather than narrow.

Other influences

The following features also informed my thinking, albeit less directly than the above criteria:

River watersheds — mostly in relation to physical separators (hill/mountain ridges, large rivers) and historical or current connectors (rivers as transportation), and as a useful source of names for areas (see below).
County lines, as a clue to possible historic cultural differences that might or might not still exist.
Per-capita income: I don’t want to delineate “rich” and “poor” areas, but rather ideally prefer a mix of wealth levels in an area. But this does provide another potential clue to which municipalities feel cohesively grouped.

One explicit non-criterion worth mentioning is population consistency. The areas vary wildly by population, and that’s fine by me.

Naming criteria

Most of the area names I’ve used fall within the following types, which intersect quite a bit:

Existing area/region names; often these cover a regional-scale land area, so I usually had to add extra descriptors for names of local areas within those regions. Examples: Mohawk Trail, Pioneer Valley, Montachusett, Nashoba Valley, North Shore, South Shore, and the sections of Cape Cod.
River valleys/watersheds, e.g. Quaboag, Blackstone, Merrimack. Where a river valley is long enough to comprise multiple areas, I like to name the areas Upper/Central/Lower [river name] Valley, or sometimes [river name] Hills for the upper part and [river name] Valley for the lower part; or to combine two nearby rivers, e.g. Blackstone-Charles.
Other prominent physical-geographic features, especially those, again, used in already-established area/region names, e.g. Quabbin, Wachusett, Hockomock.
Cultural touchstones, e.g. Tanglewood, Walden.
Greater [city name].

Observations and notes

With totals of 351 municipalities, 57 areas, and 8 or so regions in Massachusetts, we arrive at proportions of roughly 6 municipalities per area, 7 areas per region, and of course 8 regions per state. So the areas do bridge fairly well between municipal and regional scale.

Working on this map has helped me thoroughly memorize all 351 municipalities. In order to think through the entire set, it works well for me to go region by region, enumerate all the areas in a region, and then to think of all the towns in each area. It seems that the moderate size of the scale jumps (around 7 to 1) is very useful for this: it’s much easier to remember a group of six towns in an area, and then to do the same for each area in a region, than to remember all 40 to 50 towns in the region in a single grouping. (It is admittedly helpful that I have a good memory for geographic shapes, so I can visualize each area and how the towns fit into it.)

Feel free to reach out (to jbdowse at the google mail service) if you’re more familiar with various locations than I am — this is likely to include much of the southern tier of the state — and have different ideas of local areas there; or in general if any of the areas in this map feel markedly inaccurate to you. Of course, if you just like the map a lot, I’m happy to get word of that too!

References used

This is an incomplete selection of the sources I’ve referred to in my research.

Open Street Map, particularly for investigating road connectivity between towns.
The guidebook Massachusetts: An Explorer’s Guide – Beyond Boston and Cape Cod, by Christina Tree and William Davis; the copy I’ve referred to is the Second Edition, published in 1998 by The Countryman Press.
Watershed map (PDF) of Massachusetts.
MassGIS public school districts map: open the MassMapper map viewer, and in the layers list at right, select Political / Administrative Boundaries > Public School Districts > School Districts > MA Public School Districts.
MA population density map on Wikipedia.
Map of per-capita income by MA town on Wikipedia.
Lots and lots of Wikipedia pages on individual towns, regions, bodies of water, etc.
Directory of local chambers of commerce in Mass., on the MA Chamber of Commerce website, plus visiting many of the local chambers’ sites to see which towns they cover.

More upcoming

I plan to write about each area and justifications for it in upcoming posts, with one post for each region, as listed in the table of contents. Note that the regions chosen for these posts are certainly not the most canonical ones; they’re just chosen in order to keep the number of areas per region as even as possible.