Well that query threw up a lot more issues than anticipated!  Degraded rural areas, unlit urban areas, semi-urban favelas / informal settlements (there was at least one of these in the UK, actually quite near London, at Laindon, in the 1970s, but I think its been formalised into the western end of Basildon New Town now), temporary urban grazing within cities, etc etc.....Image of these former Laindon  'plotlands' here,
 http://www.laindonhistory.org.uk/page/buckingham_road_and_blue_house_farm

Many tnanks for all the replies, quite a lot of reading here.

What I was trying to do was get a figure for un-urbanised land, but of course the varying definitions of 'urban' around the globe scuppered that. If you try and 'scale down' the % population urban, to account for the hugely greater density of population of urban areas, you start to get erroneous figures for very highly urbanisd countries like Belgium, So my first idea of taking the % urban and reducing that by a factor of ten for urban area fails, at it's worst where a country is 98% or even 100% urban, as that would give, 90.2% and 90% rural respectively, which won't be right.

So here's an ad-hoc formula which 'compresses' the % urban for less urbanised countries but still approaches 100% urban area for 100% urban population countries. No it isn't based on any geog evidence, but it probably won't be too far off.

Take the % urban and raise to the power of 0.5(%urban x 100).
So a country that's 99% urban gets reckoned as 0.99 ^ (0.5 x 99).  (^ = to the power of, for those unfamiliar with mathematical notation, so 2 ^ 3 = 8).  So, 0.99 ^ 49.5 = 61% urban area.
For a 98% urban population we get 0.98 ^ 49 = 37% urban area.
97% urban population gives 23% urban area.
96% urban population gives 14% urban area,
94% urban population gives 5% urban area,
90% urban population gives 1% urban area. (One source given said the globe is ca. 2% urban by area, and it's 50% urban by population). Of course for a 100% urban country (e.g. Singapore), we still get 100% urban area (1.00 ^ 50 = 1.00)

Totally unscientific maybe but it does seem to approximate to something close to reality, for most countries. As it's density of rural population I wanted, over time from the 1950s to now, a slight 1 - 2% or so overestimation of the rural area for the less urbanised countries/times shouldn't matter too much; there's error in the population figures too of course.

Once again many thanks for all the replies and links.

Hillary J. Shaw
Director and Senior Research Consultant
Shaw Food Solutions
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8QE
www.fooddeserts.org



-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Shaw <[log in to unmask]>
To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thu, Sep 28, 2017 4:09 pm
Subject: Re: Data on % area of country that is urbanised - any suggestions?

Hello,
 
There has been a move to use satellite imagery of artificial lighting to map urbanization. I have no idea if the nation-by-nation data they have created is generally available but from what they write, the publishers of this paper have clearly attempted to use it to map % of land urbanized by country: Zhou, Y., Smith, S.J., Zhao, K., Imhoff, M., Thomson, A., Bond-Lamberty, B., Asrar, G.R., Zhang, X., He, C. and Elvidge, C.D., 2015. A global map of urban extent from nightlights. Environmental Research Letters, 10(5), 054011.
 
Clearly, this work (though they are not the only people to use artificial lighting as a proxy for human activity, Brenner included) is much more in the world of remote sensing than of critical geography. So it doesn’t particularly reflect on the rather compromised definitions of urban/rural that are being used, as Simone points out. Furthermore, such work tells you nothing of the quality of that land, from rural areas with high-speed connections or polluted mineral extraction activities, through to ‘urban’ areas that lack services and opportunities, or which look like the fields 2 minutes’ walk from the geography department here in Central Newcastle which are grazed seasonally by cattle. In other words, I’d join others in questioning what this meaningfully tells us about the spaces and more crucially, the lives of the people who live in and around them.
 
Perhaps more seriously for this approach, it doesn’t really account for urban areas where lighting is not present, and again there is a complex geography as to why some places are bright and some are dark. Sue Pritchard has written an interesting summary of the problems of the way that we often view images of the nocturnal earth: Pritchard, S.B., 2017. The Trouble with Darkness: NASA’s Suomi Satellite Images of Earth at Night. Environmental History, 22(2), pp.312-330. Some of her critiques would apply to an approach using lighting to measure urbanization.

All that said, however, if you’re happy to take this approach to measuring urbanization on its own terms and with a pack of Seabrooks crisps worth of salt*, then I can see its use as an estimate!
 
 
Cheers,
Rob
 
*With apologies for the rather UK-centric reference
 
 
Dr Robert Shaw (Lawshaw)
Lecturer in Geography
Newcastle University
 
E: [log in to unmask]
T:  0191 208 3918
W: rob-shaw.net
@WhatIsRobShaw
 
 
 
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Guibrunet, Louise
Sent: 28 September 2017 15:40
To: CRIT-GEOG-[log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Data on % area of country that is urbanised - any suggestions?
 
Hello,
 
UNEP estimates that globally, cities represent 2% of total land. See the following 2011 report on p.42:
http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/Decoupling_Report_English.pdf
 
The source is supposedly the IEA 2008 World Energy Outlook, although I have browsed through it and cannot find where this comes from.
 
I hope this helps!
Best,
Louise
 


From: A forum for critical and radical geographers <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of simone tulumello <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 28 September 2017 15:14
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Data on % area of country that is urbanised - any suggestions?
 
HI Hillary,
in The urban age in question, Brenner and Schmid have discussed how the data about "urbanised population" are basically nonsense:
  • first, the criteria are so different from country to country that comparison is analitically meaningless - an example I know, in Spain the population of a municipality considered urban is some 4/5 times bigger than the one in Portugal...
  • second, there is no conceptually rigorous definition of what is "urban" and "non-urban".
That said, I doubt those data you're seeking exist in general; and if they exist I doubt they'd make any kind of comparative sense. I'm afraid one should come up with their definition (good luck with defining univocally urban/non-urban in UK vs Portugal, let alone China or Kenya); and then use GIS to make their own maps...
Sorry for not providing much help!
(But I'd love to hear if someone knows of sources of this kind)
Best
S.
 
2017-09-27 20:00 GMT+02:00 Hillary Shaw <[log in to unmask]>:
Does anyone know of a source giving the area of a country that is urbanised. I know there is plenty of info on the % population urbanised but area seems harder to come by. I was thinking of taking, as a rough rule, % area urbanised   = 0.1 x % population urbanised, which isn't too far off for the UK (90% population urban, 9% area urban), according to this BBC article - URL attached as it has a map of UK habitat type further down. But obviously this fails for small highly urbanised countries, Hong Kong and Singapore for example, maybe Belgium too. And probably for France the other way, big rural developed countries with relatively lower population densities overall.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096

Has anyone else used a similar rule, or got any actual data on fraction of land area urbanised. This data would then give us a hande on rural population density, which may be falling in some countries even as total population rises (and migrates to the cities).
 
 
Dr Hillary J. Shaw
Director and Senior Research Consultant
Shaw Food Solutions
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8QE
www.fooddeserts.org


 
--
Simone Tulumello
Post-doc research fellow, ULisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais
 
latest publications:
Tulumello S (2017) Fear, Space and Urban Planning. Springer (link) / Tulumello S (2017) The multi-scalar nature of urban security and public safety. Urban Affairs Review (link) / Tulumello S Healey P (2016) Questioning planning, connecting places and times. plaNext special issue (link) / Tulumello S. (2016) Multi-level Territorial Governance and Cohesion Policy. EJSD (link)