Sign up now!
Get notifications on new reports and products. Currently we have 33679 subscribers. Frequency: 3-4 emails / month.
Follow us
Twitter icon Twitter
Facebook icon Facebook
YouTube icon YouTube channel
RSS logo RSS Feeds
Notifications archive

Write us Write to us

For the public:


For media and journalists:

Contact EEA staff
Contact the web team
FAQ

Call us Call us

Reception:

Phone: (+45) 33 36 71 00
Fax: (+45) 33 36 71 99


More
RSS Upcoming environmental events around the world
ENREG ENERGIA REGENERABILA® 2012
300 Aurel Vlaicu Street, 310025 Arad, Romania, 25 May 2012 - 27 May 2012
32nd annual conference of IAIA: Energy Future - The Role of Impact Assessment
Edifício da Alfândega 4050-430, Porto, Portugal, 27 May 2012 - 01 Jun 2012
GMES conference
European Environment Agency, Kongens Nytorv 6, 1050, Copenhagen K, Denmark, 04 Jun 2012 - 05 Jun 2012
More
Submit a new event
You are here: Home › Data and maps › Datasets › GMES Urban Atlas
Personal tools

GMES Urban Atlas

The Urban Atlas is providing pan-European comparable land use and land cover data for Large Urban Zones with more than 100.000 inhabitants as defined by the Urban Audit. The GIS data can be downloaded together with a map for each urban area covered and a report with the metadata.

GIS data

Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta
Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom

Methodology

Mapping Guide for a European Urban Atlas

This document contains the product description, mapping guidance and class description for the product "Urban Atlas".

Additional information

Colortables
Coordinate reference system (ESRI friendly)

Additional information

What is the European Urban Atlas?

The European Urban Atlas is part of the local component of the GMES land monitoring services.  It provides reliable, inter-comparable, high-resolution land use maps for 305 Large Urban Zones and their surroundings (more than 100.000 inhabitants as defined by the Urban Audit) for the reference year 2006.  The GIS data can be downloaded together with a map for each urban area covered and a report with the metadata.

Why was the Urban Atlas developed?

It was created to fill a gap in the knowledge about land use in European cities.  The Urban Audit, a data collection of indicators on cities and their surroundings, showed that although a wide variety of socio-economic data is available for cities, inter-comparable land use data did not exist. To facilitate more evidence-based policy-making, the European Urban Atlas was designed to compare land use patterns amongst major European cities, and hence to benchmarking cities in Europe.  It uses images from satellites to create reliable and comparable high-resolution maps of urban land in a cost-efficient manner.

Who are the main stakeholders of the urban atlas?

The Urban Atlas is aimed at everyone who wants to compare a city in one country in Europe with a city in another country.  It provides relevant data for analysis related to transport, environment and land use.

What are the benefits of the Urban Atlas?

The Urban Atlas has a legend designed to capture urban land use, including low density urban fabric, and a resolution that is 100 times higher than CORINE land cover.  The maps of the Hague and Torino show how Urban Atlas brings cities and urban fringes into focus thans to its superior resolution.  The higher resolution in combination with the street network allows for a wide range of additional analyses such as proximity to green space or train stations.  The Urban Atlas provides a far more accurate picture of urban sprawl in the fringe of urban zones.

Who is involved in the Urban Atlas?

The Urban Atlas is a joint initiative of the European Commission Directorate-General for Regional Policy and the Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry with the support of the European Space Agency and the European Environment Agency. The Urban Atlas was executed by the French company Systèmes d’Information à Référence Spatiale (SIRS), who was awarded a contract through an open call for tender.

There is one zip archive per area, e.g. for Vienna: at001l_wien, which includes

    • The actual vector data in ESRI shapefile format (Reprojected to LAEA/ETRS89)
    • A PDF document with a high-resolution map of the area (Reprojected to LAEA/ETRS89)
    • A MS Word document with metadata and results of quality checks, referring to the original, non-reprojected data

Link to the related map viewer: http://discomap.eea.europa.eu/map/UrbanAtlas.

Produced maps and graphs

Related websites

Publish date:
28 May 2010
Temporal coverage:
2005-2007
Last upload:
28 May 2010
Geographical coverage:

EU25, EU27, EU12, EU15

 
Tags:
urban | vector data | geospatial data
Scale of the data set:
1:10000
Rights:
EEA standard re-use policy: unless otherwise indicated, re-use of content on the EEA website for commercial or non-commercial purposes is permitted free of charge, provided that the source is acknowledged (http://www.eea.europa.eu/legal/copyright). Copyright holder: Directorate-General Enterprise and Industry, Directorate-General for Regional Policy.
Methodology:

Compiled from thousands of pictures from European satellites, Urban Atlas provides sufficient coverage for detailed and cost-effective mapping of larger urban zones, yielding accurate land cover and usage data. Urban Atlas' mission is to provide high-resolution hotspot mapping of changes in urban spaces and indicators for users such as city governments, the European Environment Agency (EEA) and European Commission departments. More than 300 major cities in the EU will be covered by early 2011. More details can be found in the Mapping Guide (see section: Methodology)

Coordinate reference system:
EPSG:3035
Source:

Directorate-General Entreprise and Industry (date of delivery: 15 Mar 2010 and 21May 2010).

Owners:
Directorate-General Enterprise and Industry
Directorate-General for Regional Policy
Permalink to this version
9df69b925454fd267512ea65898dbbdc
Permalink to latest version
EVKM7T3IF2
 

News and articles about this data

Document Actions
European Environment Agency (EEA)
Kongens Nytorv 6, 1050, Copenhagen K, Denmark.
Phone: +45 3336 7100
The European Environment Agency (EEA) is an agency of the European Union.
Legal notice EU flag
 

engineered by
EEA Web Team

Creative Commons Attribution License CMS login Software updates history Code for developers Refresh this page