Urban Atlas

Objectives

The Urban Atlas provides high resolution land use data based on the exact same boundaries as the Urban Audit for all its Larger Urban Zones. The Urban Audit is a collection of statistical data collected by Eurostat in the EU-27 member countries. Future editions of the Urban Atlas are planned every three to five years, communicating on the evolution of cities.

In future, the analysis of Urban Atlas data will benefit significantly from having access to socio-economic data for the same areas and vice versa the Urban Audit will benefit from having access to reliable and comparable urban land use data and a spatial representation of its information.

The complete list of cities is available here:

Implementation

The implementation of the Urban Atlas project was awarded to the French company SIRS in December 2008. Until September 2010 228 (out of 305 planned) cities (> 100.000 inhabitants) have been mapped using very high resolution (2.5 m) EO data (Spot 5, Formosat-2, Kompsat-2 and ALOS data) for the reference year 2006 ± 1 year. The Urban Atlas cities are mapped at a nominal scale of approximately 1:10.000, using in total 20 classes of which the 17 urban classes have a minimum mapping unit (MMU) of 0.25ha and the 3 non-urban classes a MMU of 1ha. The urban fabric (CLC classes 1.1.1 and 1.1.2) are differentiated by their degree of imperviousness which is integrated from the LMCS high resolution soil sealing layer.

The production is based on a mix of CAPI (Photo-interpretation) and object oriented classification with a 3-step validation involving a project internal quality assessment (carried out by IGN-FI), independent experts and a technical review by the ETC LUSI. So far the quality of products is good, errors have been reprocessed by the contractor and the production is going on quite smoothly, except some problems with the availability of required EO data.

The Urban Atlas nomenclature can checked online or download the pdf

Data Access

The data sets and maps can be downloaded from the EEA Urban Atlas website. Additionally, the maps can also be seen through a map viewer, which will be gradually improved.

Viena Urban Atlas Overview