EUROPEAN COMMISSION

EUROSTAT

DG REGIO

DRAFT MINUTES

Eurostat – Unit E4

Meeting of National Urban Audit Co-ordinators expert group

10 and 11 May 2017

Brussels, BU-1 VIP Room

Luxembourg, 23/05/2017

  1. Approval of the agenda and of the minutes of previous meeting

Agenda was approved

  1. Nature of the meeting

This is the annual meeting of the National Urban Audit Co-ordinators from the National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) with Eurostat and DG REGIO. The aim of the expert group is to discuss the state of play and the future of the city data collection, different national and European projects that make use of city data, policy developments and needs as well as possible improvements concerning existing methodological and technical issues.

  1. Policy developments

Lewis Dijkstra gave the introduction to the meeting giving an overview of the news from DG REGIO since the last NUAC meeting. These are: the Urban Agenda for the EU was adopted. It has three main goals: better regulation, better funding and better knowledge and data.

In support of this agenda, REGIO published the 'The State of European Cities' together with UN-Habitat. Around 40% of the data used for the analysis is from Eurostat. It also created a new urban data platform with the JRC.

At the UN-Habitat III conference, the EU committed to help the implementation of the new Global Urban Agenda through three actions: develop a global, people-based definition of cities and settlements together with the OECD and the WB, encourage more city to city exchanges and implement the global urban agenda through the urban agenda for the EU,. The negotiations on the SDG indicator for the EU are still ongoing. These documents and initiatives show the recognition of the fact that cities play a significant role in the EU and at global level.

DG REGIO is following closely the preparations for the post 2020 Census strategy ongoing at Eurostat (population data at city level under Regulation).

The key challenge for the future will be to simplify the regional and urban funding, to make them more visible to the citizens and to engage cities in a better way. Discussions on the multi-annual framework are ongoing, but may continue into 2018.

  1. News from Eurostat

Gunter Schäfer gave an overview over events in Eurostat of importance for City Statistics. The aspect of primary importance is certainly the Annual Work Programme (AWP) for 2018. City statistics as well as sub-national statistics in general are well represented in the programme. The AWP in this respect certainly reflects the growing importance of the urban dimension as visible in the EU Urban Agenda initiative and the Quito Habitat Conference. Of current primary importance is the discussion on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in which the SDG 11 plays a primary role for cities. It states explicitly the objective to “Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. The discussion not only within Eurostat currently focuses on what this means and which concrete indicators and targets need to be defined in order to make this goal operational. Further progress was achieved with respect to the so-called TERCET Regulation on typologies, which is currently in the regulatory process in the Council and Parliament. Progress on this subject looks very promising. A further current initiative is related to operational aspects of the NUTS 2016 implementation, in particular, as far as the back casting of regional statistics with respect to territorial changes is concerned.

Related to the past year, the Eurostat publication on cities, which supplemented the corresponding DG REGIO publication, was certainly a major achievement. The Regional Yearbook and the city publications were completed in parallel.

  1. Future of city statistics – meeting the demand of urban policies
  1. Planned work programme for 2017-2019

Eurostat has briefly presented the work carried out since the last NUAC meeting in 2016 following the phases of the Generic Statistical Business Process Model. The major milestones included:

•Release and promotion of the Urban Europe publication

•Assessment of the city statistics based on the contributions from NUACs (kicked off at the Working Group meeting in October 2016 and finished in the first quarter of 2017)

•Stakeholder consultation focusing on policymakers and researchers carried out in March 2017

All related documents (summary of the assessment and summary of the Stakeholder consultation) are available on CircaBC.

Building on the conclusions from the assessment and consultation mentioned above, Eurostat covering the period 2018-2020 proposed a new work programme. The new work programme foresees a harmonized deadline for data delivery. It also emphasizes the need for harmonization. The work programme also calls for the use of new data sources and methods to produce sub-national statistics.

Eurostat invites all Member States and EFTA countries to join the new work programme. Eurostat has also published a call for proposal to support Member States in implementing the proposed work programme. The deadline to submit proposals is 30 June 2017. The description of the work programme is included in the technical annex of the call for proposals.

Eurostat has also launched a pilot project focusing on small area estimation methods. The project aims at testing the feasibility of estimating poverty indicators for cities using small area estimation methods. Eurostat will keep NUACs informed on the results, which are expected in the course of summer 2017.

  1. Sustainable Development Goal indicators for cities

DG REGIO presented the main challenges concerning the selection of SDG indicators for cities from policy perspective.

The Global SDG indicators cannot be easily adapted to the European SDG indicators since in the negotiations are involved multiple actors, indicators' definitions are not always clear and not relevant to the EU. Undoubtedly, all indicators under Goal 11 are relevant to the EU. A key question is how the Global, EU, national and sub-national SDGs will fit together.

For the purposes of the light monitoring report on SDGs planned for 2017, Eurostat decided to limit the coverage to 6 indicators per goal. It is still unclear to what extent the selected indicators will include a breakdown by region, Degree of Urbanisation or per city. The needs of DG REGIO and JRC are for individual cities' data on access, land use, environmental issues and traffic fatalities.

  1. City definition
  1. Update on TERCET

Tercet, the legislative initiative to integrate a number of territorial typologies into the NUTS Regulation, was adopted by the Commission at the end of 2016. The proposal is currently discussed at the Council and the Parliament. Taking into account how the discussions go, we expect it to be adopted by then end of this year.

During the readings at the Council Working Party on Statistics, it was made clear that the typologies shall only serve statistical purposes, and that Member States can keep different ones for the national level.

Tercet covers the following typologies:

The aim is to establish a legal recognition of the typologies, ensuring a harmonised application of the concepts at EU level.

More info (including the proposal for a Regulation) here:

  1. Update on Global commitment for a people based city definition

DG REGIO presented the commitment for a people based city definition launched during Habitat III in Quito in 2016 by the EU, OECD and the World Bank. The approach tests two definitions with a common element, namely the cities – Degree of Urbanisation and Functional Urban Area. The goal of this commitment is to present a definition to UN Statistical Commission in 2019.

To create a global 1km2 population grid, census population data was combined with a building detection layer base on satellite imagery. Pilots with individual countries have been used in order to use better national data as an input. The comparison between the results for the population's distribution by Degree of Urbanisation per continent and the figures reported by the countries to the World Urbanisation Prospects showed significant differences. For instance, the Degree of Urbanisation defines Asia as 89% urban vs 48% in the World Urbanization Prospects. Africa is 81% urban according to the Degree of Urbanisation but only 40% according to the World Urbanisation Prospects. The differences are even more striking when the comparison is done by country. The different results are due to diverse or unknown national definitions, unclear frequency of the updates, over- or underestimation of the population density caused by the nature of the method used.

At the next step, all NSIs outside the EU will be invited to reply to a survey on the degree of urbanisation (validity and utility) and the number of pilot projects will be expanded.

  1. Spatial dimension in the city database – coding, boundaries, revisions

Eurostat presented the key principles of building and updating the spatial dimension behind the city database. The process of updating of the city layer has been described in details – starting with the DEGURBA update, update of the city list, delineation of new FUAs and update of 'old' FUAs based on 2011 commuting data and all corresponding consultation with the NSIs. The latest consultation was on the city layer. Some outstanding issues were mentioned:

  • The Office for National Statistics (UK) will decide on the cities in Scotland and Northern Ireland by the end of June 2017;
  • Danish FUAs will be delivered by mid-June
  • France will also provide details on the administrative reorganisation of local areas and its impact on cities.
  • The lists of components of the new FUAs in Greece and Hungary are expected by Eurostat
  • Eurostat would welcome feedback on the city layer from Belgium, Poland, Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway.

The update of DEGURBA resulted in 79 new cities in 9 countries; only 2 cities and their FUAs have been removed from the city list. It was pointed out that all LAUs coded as 1 in DEGURBA must be cities or part of Greater cities on the city layer. Some tricky cases such as definition of FUA of Greater city and municipalities meeting the criteria to be a part of the FUAs of two cities have been explained.

The coding system of the city database has been clarified with some examples as the discussions during the consultations showed that the coding principles are still confusing.

It was agreed to allow for some flexibility in applying the minimum population threshold of 50 000 for the urban centre in the city definition process. For example, if the population is slightly less than 50 000 but the area is characterized by an increasing population trend this area could be defined as a city.

Including towns with significantly less than 50 000 inhabitants in their ‘centre’ would increase the number of spatial units in the data collection to 8000. This was considered too ambitious. DG REGIO is considering launching a separate project focusing on some of these towns in the future.

DG REGIO and Eurostat expressed the need to increase transparency and stability in the city boundaries.

  1. Dissemination
  1. City Statistics Illustrated

Eurostat presented the web tool "Regions and Cities Illustrated" (RCI), which now covers regional and city data as well as data by typologies. RCI offers several ways of visualisation quite a number of datasets, and is a very powerful tool using maps and graphs interactively.

RCI is available here:

The old stand-alone tool "City Statistics Illustrated" was discontinued when the functionalities were integrated into RCI.

  1. Urban Data platform

DG REGIO gave a live demonstration of the Urban Data platform, which provides a single entry point to decision-makers, policy analysts and other stakeholders to exchange information on the status and trends of European cities and metropolitan regions. It is a joint initiative of the DG JRC and DG REGIO. The tool visualizes data via maps at three different geographical units including EU-wide Cities/Greater Cities, Functional Urban Areas and Metropolitan Regions according to the data availability. It also includes time series graphs and comparison tables for selected cities, for Metropolitan Regions, and by Degree of Urbanisation.

The indicators cover various topics such as demography, economic development, social issues, urban development, transport and accessibility, resource efficiency, environment and climate.

  1. Presentations by NUACs
  1. Germany

The German NUAC Alexandra Muth gave an overview on the state of play of actions related to Task 7 of the current grant (Raise awareness and increase knowledge about sub-national statistics). The subtasks include the improvement of the dedicated website the organisation of yearly meetings for city delegates, the preparation of two printed brochures, the update of the dynamic reports (Perception Survey Atlas, Structural data atlas), creating city profiles using a flexible reporting tool, improving the usability of data by updating the DUVA-system and last but not least customising the Eurostat infographic poster for German cities. Suggestions and questions are more than welcome (). The presentation is available on CIRCA.

  1. Netherlands

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) has revised the list of the cities and FUAs due to the new methodological manual of the UA and the new calculation of the Degree of Urbanisation (DEGRUBA) based on 2011 population figures. The revised boundaries will be used for data deliveries for the reporting year 2015 and onwards. The method used to revise the cities and FUAs and several issues that CBS encountered in the revision are presented. In 2014 – before the revision – the Netherlands consisted of 51 cities and 31 FUAs. After the revision 57 cities and 38 FUAs are defined.

Two special cases were presented. First, the LAU of Vaals, is located near the German border and is part of the High Density cluster of the German city Aachen. Statistics Netherlands posed the question if it would be possible to use cross-border FUAs in such cases in the future. Secondly, the issues concerning the Dutch region Randstad were presented. This is the name of the Western part of the Netherlands. Almost all municipalities (LAUs) in this part of the Netherlands are included in a FUA. To prevent the creation of one oversized FUA, the rule was applied that to be included in a FUA at least 15% of the working population of a LAU has to work in the main city of the FUA.

Furthermore, several more general issues were presented: (1) how to handle future boundary changes at LAU-level, (2) issues with the definitions of Sub City Districts and Greater Cities and (3) the coding new (and old) spatial units.

  1. Italy

Italy carried out major revisions of the Urban Audit dataset and universe. The data disseminated was reviewed and the statistical information is being revised, integrated and updated. The city list was revised according to the criteria presented in the Methodological Manual 2017. Cities and their FUAs were redefined according to the 2011 population grid and to the commuting flows based on the 2011 population census.

The application of different methodologies for defining a city was also the object of a specific analysis. Its impact was tested on some case studies and at national level, showing some significant divergences from the results published by OECD. DG REGIO pointed out that in principle there is an agreement on the common EU-OECD city definition. Apparently, OECD performs the updates with some delay. It was concluded that the differences found by ISTAT are due to a communication gap. Eurostat and DG REGIO promised to address this issue and make sure that these differences are avoided in the future. Nevertheless, the analysis carried out by ISTAT was very much welcome since it demonstrates the sensitivity of the method.

Eurostat and DG REGIO thanked all three NUACs for their presentation and very valuable insights.

  1. Perception Survey

DG REGIO gave an overview of the state of play of the current survey and the new set-up of the Perception Survey officially called 'Quality of life in European cities'.

The Perception survey is a unique source of information with significant echo in the media. There is still space of improvement as it is an underexploited resource, coordination with other surveys such as the EU-SILC is low and some methodological issues with regard to sampling and questions need to be addressed.

The survey is carried out every 3 years contracted out through the Eurobarometer framework contract. It covers around 79 cities in the EU, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Turkey. Concerning the new set-up planned for October 2018, the survey will be with the same frequency, will cover at least the same cities and the Greater cities will be always the preferred reference. DG REGIO will determine the questions a year ahead together with Eurostat and the NUACs. For this purpose, an on-line EU-Survey will be launched in May 2017. According to the plan, the questionnaire will be finalised in October 2017.