ESPON 1.1.1: The Role, Specific Situation and Potentials of Urban Areas as Nodes in a Polycentric Development (2002 - 2004) |
|
|
|
This project in the framework of the ESPON initiative of the European Commission tries to analyse the role, situation and potentials of urban areas as nodes in a polycentric development in Europe. The study has four main objectives:- the analysis of existing spatial structures and spatial relationships in Europe, in particular with reference to the degree of physical and functional division of work and polycentricity on different spatial levels;
- the development of a concept to analyse the degree of polycentricity at different spatial levels, including the development of appropriate measure, typologies, instruments and methods for quantitative assessments;
- identification of regions in Europe that particularly suffer or particularly benefit from polycentricity, and description of these regions using the developed set of indicators;
- development of policy recommendations and policy guidelines based upon the findings in 3.
The task of RRG was the delimitation of so-called Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) at NUTS 5 level by applying GIS techniques on the basis of the RRG GIS Database. The FUAs were constructed based on 45-minute car travel time isochrones around each of the 1,600 FUA centres, approximated to municipality boundaries. These areas have furthermore been analysed from a morphological perspective.
The final report of the overall study can be downloaded in pdf format from the ESPON Homepage, so as the Annex Report D describing the RRG task.
|
|
|
