Sistemas de informação geográfica

Urban-rural typologies
The objective of this exercise is to obtain, for a chosen country in Europe, the spatial delimitation of the urban and rural areas and compute a number of relevant indicators. The delimitation will be based solely on the distribution of residential population. The source of the population distribution is a vector grid for the entire Europe, with a spatial resolution of 1 km2. Each cell of the grid contains the total number of inhabitants. The dataset can be downloaded through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/exercicio-ae2012. Each student must choose a different country.
According to Dijkstra and Poelman (2011), urban areas are defined in the following manner:
Clusters of contiguous grid cells of 1 km2 with a density of at least 300 inhabitants per km2 and a minimum population of 5000.
The student is expected to write a short essay providing the results of each task and the answers to the questions. Major operational steps followed to produce the results should also be reported in a simple and objective manner.
Task 1: Produce a map with the spatial delimitation of urban and rural areas for the chosen country. In addition, answer to the following questions:
1. How many individual urban areas were identified in the country of analysis?
2. What percentage of land area was classified as ‘urban’?
3. What is the average population density in both urban and rural areas?
4. What is the level of urbanization of the country? (level of urbanization = the share of people living urban areas)
Task 2: Classify the NUTS3 regions according to the level of urbanization:
Class ‘Predominantly rural’: the share of population living in urban areas is lower than 50%. A predominantly rural region which contains an urban centre of more than 200 000 inhabitants representing at least 25% of the regional population becomes intermediate.
Class ‘Intermediate’: the share of population living in urban areas is between 50% and 80%. An intermediate region