Downscaling European urban-rural typologies

Abstract

Urban-rural typologies are important means to improve social or economic policies and to reveal development patterns related to urbanisation. They are usually very differently defined and case specific, but there are also a few, more widely used typologies at the European scale. In this note typologies from the OECD, DG Regio, Eurostat and ESPON are compared and downscaled to the level of Danish municipalities to get a sharper picture of the urban-rural structure in Denmark. The downscaled typologies are generally consistent, easy to reproduce and can be used for analyses of the development in urban-rural space.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Julien Grunfelder and Jørgen Primdahl for their valuable comments and remarks. The work was funded by the Centre for Strategic Urban Research, Realdania Research.