In recent years, new definitions of cities and countries and the regions within them have emerged. In particular, how a region comes to be considered as ‘rural’ or ‘urban’ or somewhere in between has been a subject of some debate.
This has led to a drive to seek new territorial classification methods on the part of research institutes, statistical centres and European researchers in order to define these new territorial contexts. This book analyses these various attempts by listing different taxonomies, highlighting some criticisms and pointing out some suggestions to build more effective methods of classification.
1. Introduction
2. The main characteristics of rural and urban areas
3. The process of construction of urban-rural zoning
4. Towards a taxonomy of zoning classification methods
5. Statistical methods of zoning
6. Spatial methods of zoning
7. Bibliography
Valentina Cattivelli is a Researcher at Eupolis Lombardia, the Research Center for the Lombardy Region of Italy
