This presentation by Lewis Dijkstra from the European Commission analyses the brand new UN World Urbanization Prospects, with emphasis on its data collection methods and its implications.
The newly released UN World Urbanization Prospects include, for the first time, data on cities, towns and rural areas based on a UN-endorsed harmonised definition called the degree of urbanisation. This is a major improvement as the national definitions of urban and rural areas are not comparable and differ widely. Furthermore, many national definitions have changed over time making time series analysis difficult. This release provides indicators not only for population, but also for land and built-up area by degree of urbanisation and for more than 12,000 individual cities. The presentation will cover the methods and data sources used to create this time series and will highlight the advantages and short comings. Finally, it will focus on what we can learn from this time series and what the important policy implications are for cities large or small across the globe.
Meet our speaker
Lewis Dijkstra is the Head of the Urban and Territorial Analysis team, part of the Joint Research Centre at the European Commission. Aside from this work, he has also been a visiting professor at the LSE, a Penn Institute for Urban Research Scholar and a fellow of the Regional Studies Association.
Meet our chair
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is the Princesa de Asturias Chair and a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics. He is the Director of the Cañada Blanch Centre at LSE. He was formerly the Head of the Department of Geography and Environment between 2006 and 2009. He is a past President of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) (2015-2017) and served as Vice-President of the RSAI in 2014. He was also Vice-President (2012-2013) and Secretary (2001-2005) of the European Regional Science Association.
More about this event
The Cañada Blanch Centre at LSE sets out to achieve the Fundación Cañada Blanch's goal of developing and reinforcing links between the United Kingdom and Spain. This is done by fostering cutting-edge knowledge generation and undertaking joint research projects between researchers in the United Kingdom and at the LSE on the one hand, and Spain on the other hand.
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