We are interested by your project because we are a similar one but focused on the small centres in periurban area of the Dakar the metropolitan centre in Senegal and other one by the senegalese estern frontiers.
In our case we considered as urban centres the most important municipality of a selected set of functional urban areas. These municipalities are usually those with the higher number of inhabitants and employees. In Europe they further host some specific kinds of activity, namely the KIS (Knowledge Intensive Services) or KIBS (Knowledge Intensive Business Services). If you are interested on urban centres as part of a given municipality, in Europe we use, among the others, the OECD methodology which is basically based on population density.
http://www.oecd.org/regional/redefiningurbananewwaytomeasuremetropolitanareas.htm
you can count the number of services provided by the center as a measure of urban strength. e.g. restaurants, clothing stores, hospitals, clinics, govt offices, etc, each is an individual service. the more, the more urban.
Thank you of your response wich are useful for me. Because in the case of Senagal, urban status done by only political decisions can't not to allow to distinguish rural and urban area. So official data on urbanization must criticated to be the objectve realities of senegalese settlements
Check Central Place Theory, my article on medical care regions. In this case, we counted the number of medical specialties (services) in each city. Actually a count of all services would do. Many businesses have associations which define the array of services in their businesses, e.g.in the US, restaurant associations have various ethnic, togo, fine dining, etc. and they can be used as a measure or urbanity also.
I remember Genevieve Giuliano once did a study on how to identify (multiple) urban centers in Los Angeles. They employ multiple variables such as population density, employment density, traffic, business activities, and so on. This is an important topic because it is crucial to identifying a polycentric city or even more dispersed city.
European COMISSION introduced a methodology based on urban density in their last state of European cities report. It can be measured via satellite data. This is an objective an transferable approach that you could into.
Thank you for your very interesting answers. Apparently in the various definitions urban morphology appears only marginally, would it be enough to define the city only by its demographic, economic dimensions?
I hope you find this useful
Article Urban Development Strategies of City Centers: The Case of Ra...
Dear Omar Asfour
Thanks. It's sure this case study will be useful.
Regards. Pap
For a definition of an 'EUC' (emerging urban centre) in the context of this study, please see the latest publication:
Lazaro, E, Agergaard, J, Larsen, MN, Makindara, J & Birch-Thomsen, T. 2017. Rural Transformation and the Emergence of Urban Centres in Tanzania. IGN Report, October 2017. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Dear Torben Birch-Thomsen, Thank you this shared document. It will be useful for me.
Pap Sakho
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