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Data from July 2009, most recent data: Further Eurostat information, Main tables and Database.

Table 1: Total population 2004

In the European Union, 74 % of the total population lives in cities and towns with more than 5 000 inhabitants; in other words, only a quarter of all European citizens live in a rural environment. Therefore, it matters very much to policy-makers, be they at European, national, regional or local level, to understand what is happening economically and socially in Europe’s urban areas.

Eurostat's Urban Audit is an extensive data collection of urban statistics providing information on many different aspects of the quality of urban life. This article presents comparisons of Europe’s cities on a number of important dimensions.

Main statistical findings

Table 2: Population change, 1999–2004

Table 3: Population age groups, 2004

Table 4: Unemployment rate, 2004

Table 5: Structural employment indicators

Table 6: Burglary rates, 2004

Table 7: Car thefts, 2004

Table 8: Rainfall in 2004 (litre/m²)

Table 9: Cinemas attendance and number of seats

Total population

Among the 357 Urban Audit cities, there were 26 cities with a population of over one million in 2004: 21 were in the EU and five in Turkey^[1]). Some 65 million people lived in these 26 cities, covering 43 % of the population of all Urban Audit cities.

In fact, the population of these 26 cities covers 11 % of the total population of the countries considered (the EU plus Turkey, Norway and Switzerland).

Table 1 gives the population of the 15 largest Urban Audit cities. It shows that Istanbul, with a population of nearly 10 million inhabitants, is the largest city, followed by Greater London and Paris (including the 'petite couronne' - the zone consisting of the three administrative departments surrounding Paris: the Hauts-de-Seine, the Seine-Saint-Denis and the Val-de-Marne).

Most conurbations with more than one million inhabitants are capitals. Non-capitals among the 15 largest cities are (apart from Istanbul) Izmir in Turkey and Hamburg in Germany.

Population change

Turkish cities are growing considerably faster than cities inside the EU. In Table 2, non-EU cities have been excluded to avoid dominance of the data by Turkish cities and to focus on EU issues.

Five of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the EU are in Spain, but also several Italian and Portuguese cities are growing very fast. However, the city with the fastest growing population is Almere in the Netherlands, a city created only in 1984 in order to cope with the population overflow from Amsterdam. It is followed by another Dutch city: Utrecht.

In addition, Manchester and Cambridge in the United Kingdom show a strong population growth. Nine of the 15 most-severely depopulating cities are in Romania. According to the data, between 1999 and 2004 population has been flowing out of Romanian cities at an enormous pace. The list is, however, headed by an eastern German city - Frankfurt/Oder - that has seen a 13.8 % decrease in population over the period.

Age profiles

If we examine the age structure of the cities, some striking results can be found in the Urban Audit data set. Ignoring again the Turkish cities, conurbations in the United Kingdom and in Norway have the highest share of children under 15 years of age (see Table 3). However, the highest proportion of children in a city population can be found in Almere, the Netherlands, which was also the fastest growing city in Europe.

Most Turkish cities show an even higher proportion of children under 14. To include them in the table would have created a list of only Turkish cities.

When we examine the proportion of people aged over 64, we do indeed obtain a single nation list. Apart from one exception, all cities with a very high share of elderly people are in Italy. The only exception is Lisboa in Portugal. The next non-Italian city on the list is ranked number 12, Mülheim an der Ruhr (DE) with 22.6 % of the population over 64, the next is ranked number 18, Bilbao (ES) with 21.4 %.

Unemployment

If we take the Urban Audit cities for which unemployment data are available, we find some striking disparities between the cities.

The unemployment rate ranges from 28.3 % in Pointe-a-Pitre on Guadeloupe (FR) to 4.4 % in Bern (CH). Five of the 15 cities with the highest unemployment rates are in Poland, while four are in eastern Germany.

Among the cities with the lowest unemployment rates are six in Norway and four in the United Kingdom.

Table 4 illustrates that unemployment is very much influenced by national factors which set the overall level of unemployment. The influence of urban factors seems to be smaller in this area.

Employment

When it comes to the employment indicators in the Urban Audit, we find that an extraordinary high proportion of employment in the services sector can be found in many cities in central and western Europe (see Table 5). The highest proportion is found in Luxembourg with 96.0 %. There are seven British cities in the top 15, but also two cities in Switzerland, three in the Netherlands, one in Denmark and in Germany. Most of these cities are acknowledged centres of research, financial services and administration.

If we examine the top-10 list of cities with a very high proportion of self-employed people, we obtain a very different picture: self-employment is concentrated in the south of Europe, in particular in nine Greek cities, but also Italian, Spanish and Turkish cities. Self-employment is very rare in all Scandinavian countries, with rates below 5 %.

Crime rate

The Urban Audit also records more unpleasant characteristics affecting a city’s attractiveness. For example, various measurements of crime can be found. If we look, for example, at the number of domestic burglaries in the capitals, as far as data is available, Brussels is leading the list, followed by Zurich, Dublin and then London. Lefkosia, Helsinki, Bratislava and Luxembourg are the least affected by this type of crime (see Table 6).

It should however be noted that the reporting of burglaries may depend on insurance requirements in a given country or on the perceived efficiency of the police force.

Table 6 indicates that car thefts seem to be more frequent in Italian cities, but five British cities are also in the top 15. The only non-Italian or British cities noteworthy in this record of crime are Limerick in Ireland and Oulu in Finland.

Climate

An important factor for the attractiveness of a city is certainly the weather it experiences. While the number of hours of sunshine, another Urban Audit indicator, might be regarded as positive by some and disliked by others, most people would agree that rain is a negative feature. So an examination of the average the rainfall in litres per square meter in the various cities would be of interest.

Among the driest places are six Turkish cities, but also cities in Portugal, Cyprus and Greece feature on the 'dry' list in Table 8. Not surprisingly, given their location facing the Atlantic, several British and Irish cities come in the top 10 of the rainiest places to live or visit. But the 'wet' list in Table 8 is led by two German cities, Halle a. d. Salle and Köln.

Cinemas

According to Table 9, Luxembourg has the highest cinema attendance per unit of population, followed by Paris in France and Badajoz in Spain. In the top 15 list are cities in Switzerland, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Germany. Clearly cinema attendance is not focused in one single country and is still a popular pastime across Europe.

Ancona offers the highest number of cinema seats for its population, followed by Vitoria/Gasteiz and Alicante/Alacant, both in Spain. But also cities in Switzerland, the Slovak Republic, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and Germany offer a high number of cinema seats for their populations.

Data sources and availability

Data availability

All Urban Audit data have to undergo a stringent quality check, where consistency is tested and outlier values are searched and then questioned. The process is still ongoing, which means that certain data were received by Eurostat, but have not yet been published, since they failed the quality check. As a consequence, more data are constantly uploaded onto the public Eurostat website, as and when they have been checked and approved.

Definitions

All definitions of the indicators and the underlying raw data follow, as much as possible, the definition of national and regional figures, in order to allow for comparability. If a given data set follows a different definition, data providers were asked to estimate the data in line with the required definition.

An example may illustrate this approach. In general for cities, only registered unemployment data are available. In order to arrive at unemployment figures that are in line with the International Labour Organization concept of unemployment, which are comparable with national and regional unemployment statistics, the level of the measured registered unemployment data has to be adjusted to the level of ILO unemployment with the aid of a mark-up factor.

Comparability

Data at a city level is sometimes less comparable between countries than regional or national statistics. Definitions and the response behaviour may differ despite all efforts to harmonize concepts. For example, the reporting of car thefts or burglaries may depend on insurance requirements in a given country or on the efficiency or perceived efficiency of the police force.

Coverage

The data published in the tables in this article should not be interpreted as a 'Top 10' or definitive ranking of all European cities. As mentioned in the introduction, the Urban Audit is based on only a sample of cities. Moreover, data is not always available for all cities in the sample. For example, for the indicator on domestic burglaries only 63% of the cities provided data.

History and cities covered

The Urban Audit exercise can now look back over almost a decade of trials, errors and achievements. Several concepts were tested and large volumes of data were collected during the pilot study in 1999, the first large-scale data collection round of 2003/2004 and the most recent collection round of 2006/2007. The data which passed the stringent quality controls have been available on Eurostat’s dissemination website since 29 April 2008. The uniqueness of the Urban Audit data set lies in the extent of its three main dimensions:

wide choice of indicators;
large geographical coverage;
long time series.

Following a pilot study of 58 cities in 1999, the data collection expanded in 2003/2004 to cover 258 cities. At present, the Urban Audit includes 321 cities with a population between 50 000 and 10 million in the EU Member States, 26 Turkish cities, six Norwegian cities and four Swiss cities. The cities were selected in co-operation with the national statistical offices, and are geographically dispersed to ensure a representative sample, meaning that the 357 cities chosen are not necessarily the largest.

Data are collected for:

the core cities;
the larger urban zones, i.e. the cities including their hinterland;
sub-city districts, for a small subset of variables.

Thematic coverage

More than 300 indicators were defined and calculated, covering most aspects of quality of life. These include:

demography;
housing;
health;
crime;
labour market;
income disparity;
local administration;
educational qualifications;
environment;
climate;
travel patterns;
information society;
cultural infrastructure.

These indicators are derived from the 336 variables collected by Eurostat. Data availability differs from domain to domain: when to come to demography, for instance, data are available for more than 90% of the cities, while as regards the environment, data are available for fewer than half of them.

Choice of the spatial unit

A city can be defined as either:

an urban settlement (morphological concept);
a functional unit;
as a legal entity (administrative concept).

The Urban Audit uses this latter concept (a legal entity) and delineates the 'core city' according to political and administrative boundaries. Due to the varying structures of local government, this concept is not always strictly comparable between countries.

It goes without saying that economic activity, health services, air pollution, etc. cross a city’s administrative boundaries. To capture information on this extended spatial level, the “larger urban zone” was defined based on commuter flows, thus approximating the functional urban area. The larger urban zone includes the core city and its commuter belt.

Finally, each core city is divided into sub-city districts. This third spatial level enables information to be collected on possible disparities within a city.

Reference year

The reference year for the last Urban Audit data collection was 2004. If, however, a data point was not available for that year, it was permitted to transmit data for neighbouring years, i.e. 2003 or 2005. In other words, the data in the tables do not always refer exactly to 2004.

Context

In the European Union (EU), 74 % of the total population lives in cities and towns with more than 5 000 inhabitants; in other words, only a quarter of all European citizens live in a rural environment. Therefore, it matters very much to policy-makers, be they at European, national, regional or local level, to understand what is happening economically and socially in Europe’s cities and towns.

It is one of the priorities of the renewed Lisbon Strategy and also of the EU's strategic guidelines on cohesion policy for 2007–2013 to improve the attractiveness of regions and cities. Whether as homes, workplaces or centres of learning, cities have a major impact on the lives of a majority of Europe’s citizens.

A good quality of life is crucial for attracting and retaining a skilled labour force, businesses, students, tourists and, most of all, residents to a city. Assessing the current economic and social situation is a prerequisite for any improvement, development and future monitoring. The Urban Audit is a response to this demand for objective information. This data collection of urban statistics provides information on the different aspects of the quality of urban life in Europe’s cities and has become a very rich source of comparable data.

Further Eurostat information

Publications

The Urban Audit — measuring the quality of life in European cities

Main tables

Urban audit (t_urb), see:

Demographic indicators - Total resident population (tgs00013)

Demographic indicators - Households with children aged 0-17 (tgs00014)

Social indicators - Average living area in square metres per person (tgs00015)

Social indicators - Mortality rate for <65 from heart diseases and respiratory illness (tgs00016)

Social indicators - Number of car thefts per 1 000 population (tgs00017)

Training and Education indicators - Students in higher education (ISCED 97 levels 5-6) per 1 000 population (tgs00018)

Economic indicators - Activity rate (tgs00019)

Economic indicators - Unemployment rate (tgs00020)

Travel and transport indicators - Number of registered cars per 1000 population (tgs00021)

Environment indicators - Collected solid waste per capita per year (tgs00022)

Cultural indicators - Total annual tourist overnight stays in registered accommodation per year (tgs00023)

Database

Urban audit (urb), see:

Key indicators for core cities (urb_ikey)

Derived indicators for core city (urb_icity)

Derived indicators for larger urban zones (urb_iluz)

Derived indicators for sub-city districts (urb_iscd)

Reduced set of derived indicators for 570 cities (urb_ilca)

Data collected for core city (urb_vcity)

Data collected for larger urban zones (urb_vluz)

Reduced set of data collected for 570 cities (urb_vlca)

Perception survey results (urb_percep)

Dedicated section

Regions and cities, see:

City statistics - Urban Audit

Methodology/Metadata

Urban audit (ESMS metadata file - urb_esms)

External links

Notes

↑ Applying the concept of the administrative city to the capital cities, in particular to London and Paris, does not necessarily yield comparable spatial units. For this reason, 'kernels' have been defined for several capital cities in order to obtain roughly comparable entities.

[0] Applying the concept of the administrative city to the capital cities, in particular to London and Paris, does not necessarily yield comparable spatial units. For this reason, 'kernels' have been defined for several capital cities in order to obtain roughly comparable entities.

[1]