Proposal of a procedure for the delimitation of urban and rural spaces by means of Geographical Information Systems: application to the Asturian case

Abstract

The growth and sprawl of current cities combined with the improvement of communications generate a higher integration of rural and urban spaces making difficult to distinguish one from another. However, to properly apply agrarian or rural policies as well as to planning the growth of the surroundings of the urban areas or to protect natural environments it is necessary to delimitate accurately urban or rural spaces. In this work a procedure to classify the territory based in indexes of building concentration or dispersion, using geographical information systems, combined with accessibility and density measures is proposed. As an illustration of how the procedure works it is applied to the case of Asturias, a region with a polycentric disperse urban area in the centre with diverse rural spaces in the periphery. The proposed combination of indicators, using principal components, allows obtaining a classification of the territory in five levels of urbanization being possible to identify very accurately the real rural areas of the region.