An urban agglomerations prototype using the Degree of Urbanisation
How to connect cities and towns with their suburbs
The Degree of Urbanisation (DEGURBA) is a globally harmonised framework for classifying cities, towns, suburbs and rural areas, which is widely used for territorial analysis and policy monitoring. However, it does not explicitly assign suburban and peri-urban areas to the cities and towns around which they are located. This report presents a methodology to delineate urban agglomerations (UAGGs) within the DEGURBA framework, enabling a coherent representation of urban systems that links urban settlements with their contiguous suburban surroundings.
The proposed approach applies a scalable, grid-based procedure that identifies urban settlements as reference points, defines contiguous urban domains, and assigns surrounding areas univocally to an urban settlement using population-weighted gravitational interactions. The method is designed to accommodate diverse urban morphologies, including monocentric and polycentric configurations, and to operate consistently at global scale without reliance on commuting data.
A two-stage calibration process, combining local exploratory testing in selected regions with global optimisation, ensures robustness and limits the inclusion of rural areas while maximising suburban coverage. The resulting urban agglomerations complement existing DEGURBA classes and provide a policy-relevant spatial unit for analysing urbanisation patterns, population dynamics, and urban–suburban relationships across countries and over time.
SCHIAVINA Marcello;
VAN MIGERODE Celine;
MELCHIORRI Michele;
PESARESI Martino;
DIJKSTRA Lewis;
2026-01-29
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC145493
978-92-68-36495-6 (online),
OP KJ-01-26-040-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC145493,
10.2760/3366043 (online),
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