Lewis Dijkstra

European Commission | ec · Regional Policy (REGIO)

The GHS Urban Centre Database (GHS-UCDB) describes spatial entities called “Urban Centres” described through a set of multi-temporal thematic attributes from the GHSL data combined with other free and open data sets.

This report assembles a series of separate scientific contributions to the European Commission’s Ninth Report on Economic, Social and Territorial Cohesion. The report includes seven short research papers providing background and insight under three broad topics with relevance to European regional and urban policy: Urbanisation and regional economic...

The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) project fosters an enhanced, public understanding of the human presence on Earth. A decade after its inception in the Digital Earth 2020 vision, GHSL is an established project of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and an integral part of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. The 2023 GHSL...

The European Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) has been producing datasets on imperviousness every 3 years since 2006. However, for 2018, the input for the production of the imperviousness dataset was switched from mixed inputs to the Sentinel constellation. While this led to an improvement in the spatial detail from 20 m to 10 m, this also...

To mitigate the impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) and air pollutant emissions, it is of utmost importance to understand where emissions occur. In the real world, atmospheric pollutants are produced by various human activities from point sources (e.g. power plants and industrial facilities) but also from diffuse sources (e.g. residential activities and...

The green energy transition and its boost to the deployment of renewable energy can offer a unique opportunity for rural areas to benefit from their natural resources. The present study aims to provide a quantitative assessment of the technical potential of renewable energy sources in the EU’s rural areas, focusing on solar, wind and hydropower. Th...

One argument for containing urban densities is that cities need a critical population density to sustain sufficiently available public transportation. However, the question of whether denser cities foster shorter public transport networks empirically is problematic because real-world transport nets are a product of many additional factors presumabl...

Knowing where emissions occur is essential for planning effective emission reduction measures and for atmospheric modelling. Emission inventories are typically compiled at national level and provide sector-specific emission estimates. Disaggregating national emissions on high-resolution grids requires spatial proxies that contain information on the...

In support of the rural vision, this policy brief was developed in cooperation with the Directorate-General (DG) for Agriculture and Rural Development and the DG for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission. The brief describes the EU’s remote rural areas, showing how remoteness can increase territorial disparities across the urban- rur...

This study proposes a sequence of methods to obtain geolocated estimates of primary school provision, costs, and access. This sequence entails: (1) location-allocation, an approach that mimics school location patterns in case of decentralised governance, such as exists in the EU and UK; (2) balanced floating catchment areas, an approach to assign p...

National city ranks do not describe a settlement’s local and regional relevance adequately. We introduce a method to rank settlements’ centrality based on travel time and settlement size. We investigate the relationship between a settlement’s size, whether it is a local or regional centre, and its service endowment. The approach explains per capita...

The purpose of this study is to identify the main factors of city life satisfaction across Europe. Data come from the recent fifth survey on quality of life in European cities and cover 83 cities located in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association countries, the United Kingdom, the Western Balkan Region and Turkey. In addition to run...

This working paper identifies the main factors that determine city-life satisfaction across Europe. Data come from the 2019 survey launched by the European Commission on the quality of life in European cities and cover 83 cities located in the European Union, European Free Trade Association countries and the United Kingdom. Based on around 58 000 r...

In recent years, protest voting, voting for populist parties and, specifically for Europe, votes for parties opposed to European integration, have increased substantially. This has focused the attention of researchers and policy makers on the causes behind this trend. Most of the existing research looked at voters' characteristics, mainly values, e...

Enhancing the well-being of its citizens is the central remit of the EU’s regional policy, but as yet, there is no analysis of the effects of EU regional policy on local well-being. The aim of this paper is to examine this relationship. To do this, we define a novel regionalised well-being measure and we exploit a dataset on regional expenditure in...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals include a range of indicators that incorporate measurements for cities and urban and rural areas. Whereas the methodology for the indicators is harmonised, the definition of urban and rural areas were not National definitions of urban and rural areas differ significantly and make them unsuitable for internationa...

In some EU regions women are able to flourish, while in others they languish behind. This paper presents two regional indices: the Female Achievement Index and the Female Disadvantage Index. They reveal in which regions women are achieving more and in which women are at a disadvantage compared to men. The two indices are based on 33 indicators grou...

The Degree of Urbanisation is a method to delineate urban and rural areas for international statistical comparison. It relies on geospatial data that are generally available in National Statistical Offices and can be implemented with open and free data and tools. This report explains the application of the Degree of Urbanisation method to the 2018...

This paper studies the population growth dynamics in European NUTS3 regions over the period of 2000–2015 and offers generalizable evidence on the main drivers of population change at this sub-level of analysis, which is so far rather unexplored. Results obtained by means of a spatial Durbin model highlight the roles of economic and demographic regi...

In recent years, protest voting, voting for populist parties and, specifically for Europe, votes for parties opposed to European integration, have increased substantially. This has focussed the attention of researchers and policy makers on the causes behind this trend. Most of the existing research looked at voters’ characteristics, mainly values,...

The Degree of Urbanisation is a new definition of cities, towns and semi-dense areas, and rural areas endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission. The urban population share according to the Degree of Urbanisation is similar to the one based on national definitions in the Americas, Europe and Oceania, but considerably higher in Africa and Asia. An em...

Some regions in Europe that have been heavily supported by the European Union’s Cohesion Policy have recently opted for parties with a strong Eurosceptic orientation. The results at the ballot box have been put forward as evidence that Cohesion Policy is ineffective for tackling the rising, European-wide wave of discontent. However, the evidence to...

This report presents the results from the fifth survey on quality of life in European cities. It covers 83 cities in the EU, the EFTA countries, the UK, the Western Balkans and Turkey. It reveals in which cities people are satisfied with a range of public services and amenities. It captures people’s experience, for example, with crime, and their fe...

The Europe 2020 Strategy was launched by the European Commission in 2010 to promote smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth across EU member states. As the strategy draws to a close in 2020 and is superseded by the Sustainable Development Goals and the Green Deal, this work aims to assess the progress made over the last decade, and to carry forwar...

The world’s largest place-based economic development policy operating within a single legal and institutional architecture is the regional and urban policy of the European Union (EU). In this paper we analyse how this policy is related to the promotion of regional well-being. In order to do this, we take advantage of the fact that the different ele...

Measurement(s) urban accessibility • congestion impact Technology Type(s) computational modeling technique Factor Type(s) longitude and latitude • urban area • transport performance • absolute accessibility • potential accessibility • location indicator Sample Characteristic - Environment city Sample Characteristic - Location Germany • Italy • Fren...

Support for parties opposed to European Union (EU) integration has risen rapidly, and a wave of discontent has taken over the EU. This discontent is purportedly driven by the very factors behind the surge of populism: differences in age, wealth, education, or economic and demographic trajectories. This paper maps the geography of EU discontent acro...

Gender equality is one of the fundamental values of the European Union and the European Pillar of Social Rights establishes it as one of its key principles. While there are several measures of gender equality at country level there is none that capture regional differences in Europe. This new regional gender equality monitor consists of two composi...

This report studies population dynamics in Europe. Its purpose is threefold. First, the report offers a literature review of the main drivers of population growth. Second, an empirical analysis is carried out in order to unveil the determinants of population growth in EU sub-regions (NUTS3 level) over the period 2000-2010. Spatial conometrics is em...

An important goal of land use and transport policies is improving accessibility to services. Access to services differs significantly between different territories, and regional development policies, including Cohesion Policy, are often used to improve accessibility where it is too low. Unfortunately, comprehensive data on facility locations is not...

Continuous global-scale mapping of human settlements in support to international agreements calls for massive volumes of multi-source, multi-temporal and multi-scale Earth Observation (EO) data. In this paper, the latest developments in terms of processing EO datacubes for the purpose of improving the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) data are p...

Continuous global-scale mapping of human settlements in the service of international agreements calls for massive volume of multi-source, multi-temporal, and multi-scale earth observation data. In this paper, the latest developments in terms of processing big earth observation data for the purpose of improving the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS...

After outlining the development of regional classification in the European Union, two recent regional and two recent local classifications created by the European Commission using the population grid are explained. Each regional classification is linked to a local one. The first pair is the urban–rural regional typology and the (local) degree of ur...

This study presents the evolution of travel speeds in the European Core road network, between 1960 and 2030. Speeds are represented in octilinear cartograms which constitutes one of the novelties of this study. Octilinear cartograms have the advantage of simplifying the geographical representation of transport networks, while emphasizing the connec...

The aim of this report is to present the within-country variability in the EU citizens’ perceptions of the eneralised and institutional trust, quality of public service and local governance based on their experiences and opinions expressed in three surveys. By within-country variability we understand differences in citizens’ perceptions between cit...

Growth before and especially after the crisis differed from large-city-led growth pattern. The crisis has led to big contractions especially in urban regions and in remote rural regions, while intermediate and rural regions close to a city displayed more resilience. In some countries, the capital metro region had much higher economic growth prior t...

This paper describes the new degree of urbanisation (DEGURBA) classification. This classification distinguishes three types of areas: densely, intermediate and thinly populated areas. This new approach was developed to harmonise several similar but not identical spatial concepts. The new classification is based on a new source of information: the p...

Do aspects of quality of government, broadly defined, such as corruption, impartiality, and quality of public services, vary below the country level? The concept of quality of government (QoG) and various measures to assess it have become more ubiquitous in several social science disciplines. QoG is related with economic and social development, bet...

Charron N., Dijkstra L. and Lapuente V. Regional governance matters: quality of government within European Union member states, Regional Studies. This study presents novel data (European QoG Index – EQI) on the ‘quality of government’ (QoG) – understood as low corruption, impartial public services and rule of law – for national and sub-national lev...

This article argues that investing in a wide range of city sizes, or a portfolio of places, can be more conducive to growth than primarily investing in the largest city. A range of cities allows each firm to find its optimal city. This reduces the needed size of cities and thus congestion costs. Less-developed European Union Member States have larg...

The ever-increasing concentration of people and economic growth in the largest cities relative to the rest of the country has slowed down or even reversed in many of the developed European countries over the last decade. This trend contradicts what the global cities, urban economics and new economic geography literature would predict. This trend ca...

The EU Regional Competitiveness Index (RCI) is the first composite indicator which provides a synthetic picture of territorial competitiveness for each of the NUTS 2 regions of the 27 EU Member States. It builds on and modifies the approach of the Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum (WEF).It consists of eleven pillars grouped i...

To account for differences among rural and urban regions, the OECD s established a regional typology, classifying TL3 regions as predominantly urban (PU), intermediate (IN) or predominantly rural (PR) (OECD, 2009). This typology, based essentially on the percentage of regional population living in urban or rural communities, has proved to be meanin...

To account for differences among rural and urban regions, the OECD has established a regional typology, classifying TL3 regions as predominantly urban (PU), intermediate (IN) or predominantly rural (PR). This typology has proved to be meaningful to better explain regional differences in economic and labour market performance. However, it does not t...

This book collects contributions from the conference that took place in Brussels 28 and 29 of May 2009: "Can creativity be measured?" organized by DG Education and Culture (DG EAC) together with the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning (CRELL) of the DG Joint Research Centre (DG JRC). The book provides an overview of two main approaches to the...

We examined the public health consequences of unsafe and inconvenient walking and bicycling conditions in American cities to suggest improvements based on successful policies in The Netherlands and Germany. Secondary data from national travel and crash surveys were used to compute fatality trends from 1975 to 2001 and fatality and injury rates for...

The neglect of pedestrian and bicycling safety in the United States has made these modes dangerous ways of getting around. Pedestrian fatalities are 36 times higher than car occupant fatalities per kilometer (km) traveled, and bicycling fatalities are 11 times higher than car occupant fatalities per km. Walking and bicycling can be made quite safe,...

This paper explores the importance of sub-national vis-à-vis national differences in good governance, control of corruption or what in the literature is known as quality of government (QoG). Methodologically the paper uses both a large-N quantitative analysis and qualitative case studies to elucidate variation in QoG across and within E.U. countrie...

Abstract will be provided by author.