Urban, Rural, or In-Between? : An adapted Territorial Typology for NUTS 2 regions

We describe the adapted urban-rural typology at the NUTS 2 regional level, an extension of the official regional urban-rural typology provided by the European Union at the NUTS 3 regional level. We used the Census Grid 2021 data and urban agglomerations data to construct an adapted typology. A typology at the NUTS 2 level enables more opportunities for regional analyses and policymaking, as European regional statistics are primarily provided at this level. The EU's regional policies, such as its Cohesion Policy, are implemented at the NUTS 2 level, and for many countries NUTS 2 levels represent administrative regions with substantial administrative, legislative, and fiscal powers. In this resource description article, we describe our adapted urban-rural typology at the NUTS 2 level and how we produced the dataset using the Census Grid 2021, Joint Research Centre's Urban Agglomerations data, and the NUTS 2 regional polygons provided by Eurostat, the European Union statistical authority. We provide the adapted urban-rural typology layer at the NUTS 2 regional level and the typology production scripts openly to support regional analyses and policymaking in Europe.