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New definition of cities is key to measuring the development goals

19 October 2016

by Richard Forster

Using administrative boundaries to define cities does not provide a harmonised definition of what constitutes a city and prevents effective benchmarking and monitoring, according to research unveiled by the European Commission.

During a side event yesterday morning at the Habitat III meeting in Quito, Lewis Dijkstra of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy at the European Commission, said that by using a definition based on the degree of urbanisation, settlements can be classified as cities, towns and suburbs, or rural, depending on the density of inhabitants within a particular area or region, as sourced from satellite data.

This is important, said Dijkstra, Deputy Head of Unit in the Economic Analysis Unit at DG Regio, as a harmonised people-based definition of cities enables effective monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 11. For example, the SDG indicators on proportion of population with convenient access to transport (11.2.1) or annual mean levels of fine particulate matter in cities (11.6.2) depend very much on where you draw a city’s boundary.

While the research and data are still in an experimental phase and need further investigation, they reveal a very different picture of global urbanisation.

“The result is that Asia and Africa are much more urban than say Europe or North America,” said Dijikstra.

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The research leading to the new definition has been led by Martino Pesaresi, a scientific officer in the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

According to Pesaresi, spatial data reporting on populations is necessary for any evidence-based modelling of human exposure to conflicts, natural disasters or environmental threats as well for modelling the impact of humans on ecosystems or their access to resources.

“From the thematic point of view, the density of population is important for many applications not only Habitat III but also the SDGs in general and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction,” explained Pesaresi, who stressed that the Global Human Settlement Layer, as it is called, is an evidence-based approach which third parties can verify to describe the human presence on the planet.

Other agencies are already employing a customised version of the Joint Research Centre’s methodology with the South African National Space Agency demonstrating how it has used the data to monitor the development of urban settlements in the country.

Earlier this month, Dijkstra outlined how the degree of urbanisation can define cities globally in the State of European Cities report, which was produced in partnership with UN-Habitat. For further information or to view the report, see: http://ec.europa.eu/cities-report.

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