Measure — Measuring Urbanity

The lack of methodology to measure urbanity across regional and national contexts limits states’ capacity to effectively assess social and spatial inequalities across their national territory. For this task, most government agencies use on local and regional population size and building footprint. Using those measurements, they create indexes that hardly relate with the social and functional characteristics of the territory. These indexes often play an important role in defining planning and infrastructure policies, including public education, transportation infrastructure and local and regional funding. In Measure, we propose a new method to measure municipal populations’ gradient of urbanity based on the size of their urban areas, their degree of centrality and their distance to larger centers. Benchmarking our gradient against those of the French Statistical Office and other empirically validated urbanity measures, we find that our method provides three main advantages. First, our gradient relates socio-professional distribution and population density, which tie with many social and economic policies and planning strategies. Second, it retains the qualities of urban areas’ large functional classification, which also implies distinct policies and planning strategies. Third, it creates a distinct category for the most isolated populations, which needs and opportunities differ greatly periurban populations that live outside of large urban areas, but remain well connected to them. These advantages highlight the utility of this methodology to improve the design and application of public policies and planning strategies, and therefore increase sustainability and social justice across the entire territory.