Yet the down-at-heel conurbation enjoys one institutional advantage.
Nottingham and other cities taking part sit at the centre of large conurbations.
What strikes the reader about these colleges of art and design, commerce, engineering and building is above all the locations: apart from the London polytechnics and colleges, this is a list of institutions at the hearts of the conurbations of industrial, regional England, with only one in Wales.
At an hourly level, 10/11 conurbations had temperatures above 30°C recorded during the study period, and the highest temperature recorded was 36.8°C in Greater London on 10 August 2003 during the European heat wave.
Improve that, throw in some seeds and fertiliser, scrap tariffs, build warehouses and roads, and the region may beat the worst of climate change.Geographers at UN Habitat, a city-planning agency, say conurbations must adapt to the needs of climate-change migrants.
In the package under debate concerning possible action aimed at increasing the level of mobility in urban conurbations, innovative technologies tend to be dealt with separately from intelligent transport systems.
Its title, Review of Sub-national Economic Development and Regeneration, may have appeared, at best, uninviting, but it heralds stronger government in conurbations, perhaps giving some areas - such as Greater Manchester - powers similar to those enjoyed by the Greater London Authority.
"We are looking at smaller sites of about 12 pitches and not those massive conurbations," he said.
Third, we investigated the effect of controlling for ambient temperature in our models at an hourly rather than daily resolution (restricting to the 9/15 conurbations with hourly temperature data: Bristol, Cardiff, Greater London, Greater Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Sheffield, West Midlands, and West Yorkshire).
In 11 large conurbations in England and Wales, short term risk of myocardial infarction seemed to increase at higher temperatures, above a threshold of 20°C.
