Demographical Trajectories of European urban areas (1961-2011) (TRADEVE)

TRADEVE project has built a harmonized database on delineations and populations of European urban areas (defined by taking into account continuous build-up areas and minimal population threshold), from 1961 to 2011. More than 3900 urban areas (exactly 3946) are considered for 2011, for 29 countries. We started from a harmonised database that allows studying small and medium urban areas, the Urban Morphological Zones (UMZ). Originally defined by the European Environment Agency from CORINE Land Cover images and continuous built-up areas criteria, UMZ were poorly used for urban studies until they were enriched in the ESPON Database by other indicators, such as a name for each agglomeration and a correspondence dictionary with LAU2 that allows joining other statistical datasets. A population density grid from the Joint Research Centre was used for attributing populations to these urban areas. After an introduction (Section 1), Section 2 focuses on the different methods that have been used for retropolating UMZ to 1961, by using and correcting for some countries the population data collections for the Local Administrative Units database on LAU2 population from Gloersen et al 2013 (Historical Population Database) and by populating the 2000 perimeter with 2011 data. In Section 3, different explorations of the resulting database are presented, for urban growth, urban hierarchy and demographic trajectories (Section 4).