Delineating Urban Areas Using Building Density / Marie-Pierre de Bellefon, Pierre-Philippe Combes, Gilles Duranton, Laurent Gobillon, Clément Gorin.

By:

de Bellefon, Marie-Pierre

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w26482.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: We develop a new dartboard methodology to delineate urban areas using detailed information about building location, which we implement using a map of all buildings in France. For each pixel, our approach compares actual building density after smoothing to counterfactual smoothed building density computed after randomly redistributing buildings. We define as urban any area with statistically significant excess building density. Within urban areas, extensions to our approach allow us to distinguish 'core' urban pixels and detect centres and subcentres. Finally, we develop novel one- and two-sided tests that provide a statistical basis to compare maps with different delineations, which we use to assess the robustness of our approach and to document large differences between our preferred delineation and the corresponding official one.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w26482 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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November 2019.

We develop a new dartboard methodology to delineate urban areas using detailed information about building location, which we implement using a map of all buildings in France. For each pixel, our approach compares actual building density after smoothing to counterfactual smoothed building density computed after randomly redistributing buildings. We define as urban any area with statistically significant excess building density. Within urban areas, extensions to our approach allow us to distinguish 'core' urban pixels and detect centres and subcentres. Finally, we develop novel one- and two-sided tests that provide a statistical basis to compare maps with different delineations, which we use to assess the robustness of our approach and to document large differences between our preferred delineation and the corresponding official one.