Minutes
of the Urban Audit Think Tankmeeting
15September2004inLuxembourg
Participants:
Dominika Felczak (Poland)
Dev Virdee (UK)
Jean-Luc Lipatz (France)
Mathieu Vliegen (Netherlands)
Klaus Trutzel (Gemany)
Lewis Dijkstra, DG REGIO
Roger Cubitt, Eurostat
Berthold Feldmann, Eurostat
Torbiörn Carlquist, Eurostat
Berthold Huber, Eurostat
Willy Croi, Landsis (Consultant)
- Introduction
Roger Cubitt welcomed the participants of the Think Tank meeting.The whole meeting took place in a very constructive atmosphere. The agenda was adopted. Berthold Feldmannreminded the participants that they should act and discuss as experts, not as representatives of their national statistics office or their country.
- Political context
Lewis Dijkstra explained the needs of urban statistics for future European cohesion policy. There will be 3 objectives in the next funding round 2007-2013:
Objective“Cohesion”, based solely on GDP/head [78% of all funds]
Objective “Competitiveness and Employment” [18% of all funds]
Objective “Cooperation” [4% of all funds]
The Objective Cohesion aims at improving the economic performance of lagging regions (regions with a GDP per capita below 75% of the EU average).
The second Objective has the two components:
(1) Regional Competitiveness and
(2) Employment.
The first component will focus on the following themes:
innovation and the knowledge society
accessibility and services of general interest
environment and risk prevention
The second component “Employment” has the following themes:
adaptability of the workforce,
job creation,
accessibility to the labour market for vulnerable persons.
The third Objective focuses on border regions, interregional, transnational and external cross border cooperation.
For urban areas, within each of these objectives a part of the budget can be allocated and subdelegated to urban areas.
Urban regeneration shall support the development of participative, integrated strategies to tackle the high concentration of economic, environmental and social problems affecting urban agglomerations.This may combine the rehabilitation of the physical environment, brownfield redevelopment, and the preservation and development of the historical and cultural heritage with measures to promote entrepreneurship, local employment and community development, as well as the provision of services to the population taking account of changing demographic structures.
For us statisticians this means that data collections should not focus only one or two themes, but rather provide a wide spectrum of data measuring the quality of life in European cities.
- Data analysis
DG REGIO will (hopefully) sign a call for tender contract beginning of 2005. In this work the results of the Urban Audit 2001 collection will be analysed. Cities will be evaluated in their national context (concentration of problems or opportunities?), the contractors will look for clusters of cities according to economic and social profiles and perform a spatial analysis of core cities, LUZ and SCD.
Participants expressed their wish to promote and possibly fund also national UA analysis. A publication series called “Portrait of the Cities” could be created. Lewis Dijkstra will look into this suggestion.
First results of the DG REGIO analysis can be expected end of 2005, but major results only in 2006.
- Spatial units (past experience and possible improvements)
a) Core city
The “core city” will remain the major focus of the Urban Audit; current definitions in the various countries are all in all satisfying.
ab) Morphological city
There remains the problem of overbounding and underbounding the city, i.e. a possible mismatch between the administrative city (= core city) and the built-up area (= morphological city).
Should the morphological agglomeration be added as a 4th spatial unit? Only a minority of participants opted for that solution.
But measures for identifying over-/underbounding were discussed. It was recommended to collect 2 new series for this:
population in built-up area of core city / residents of core city
population in built-up area of core city / pop. in morphological city
If both indices are close to 1, the core city builds up the morphological city very well. If the first index very much lower than 1, the core city includes a large part of rural areas, i.e. the city is overbound. If the second index is very much lower than 1, many people live in built-up area outside the core city, i.e. the city is underbound.
The definition of “built-up area” (agglomeration) should follow UN criteria as far as possible (maximum 200-meter gaps within the built-up area), but wherever a national implementation exists, that should be used (French and Dutch agglomerations, British and Nordic localities etc).
b) Larger urban zones
LUZ data will also remain a cornerstone of data collection, defined as the functional urban region of the local labour market. Here improvements of the delimitations are necessary for several countries. In Spain, Italy, Denmark and Greece the LUZ is often far too large. Improvements should be envisaged.
It would be helpful if data could be collected for all individual components of the LUZ (at LAU level 2).
C) Sub-city districts
For SCD the population thresholds were not always respected, but probably the current delimitations are the best we can get in the light of data availability.
The comparability problem seems to be quite severe since we have 2 groups of countries:
Countries where the SCD were artificially created with the intention to maximise heterogeneity. This is the case in France, Poland and Luxembourg.
Countries were the SCD reflect existing (historically developed) neighbourhoods. In this case statistical heterogeneity between SCD is considerably lower. This applies to all other countries.
No solution was found, further work is needed. But there is a high risk of misinterpretation of the existing figures by none statisticians.
Some delegates suggested amplifying the SCD coverage to the whole built-up area (agglomeration), in case it stretches beyond the core city. This would be particularly relevant for severely underbound cities, like Athens or Lisbon.
- Data collection in 2006
For the next data collection round there will be no fresh census data at hand. In order to analyse the importance of this problem, Eurostat will produce a table indicating the data source for each variable in each country (333 by 25 table). Most probably the response rate for SCD will suffer from this.
It was suggested to collect again the full set of data for around 260 UA cities, plus a subset of 35 so called core indicators for all (around 1000) European cities larger than a certain threshold, for example 100 000 inhabitants. The core indicators were identified during the meeting. They shall be collected more frequently, maybe even annually.
When boundaries of cities, LUZ or SCD change between 2001 and the next data collection, the new boundaries will be used and the 2001 data will be re-estimated for the new city boundaries (this was opposed by Mathieu, NL).
It was suggested that we, the Urban Audit experts, should try to influence the table programme of next population and housing census (2010/2011 round) so that the right questions are asked in all countries. "Income" would be such a question and travel to work is another important question that should not be forgotten in the general census.
- The new indicator list
As the core task of the Think Tank, the list of indicators for the 2006 collection was set up. 56 indicators (20%) were dropped from the list 5.1 (February 2004), 9 new indicators were added. This would lead to a drop of nearly 30% of all variables to be collected.
- Next meeting
The next meeting of the Think Tank should take place in January or February 2005.It should take into account the views of the Working Party meeting in November 2004.
Possible topics could be:
The variable list for 2006
The core indicators: which cities, frequency, how many series
Dissemination, in particular SCD data
Improve the meta information of UA data
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