Place-level urban-rural indices for the United States from 1930 to 2018

Abstract

Rural-urban classifications are essential for analyzing geographic, demographic, environmental, and social processes across the rural-urban continuum. Most existing classifications are, however, only available at relatively aggregated spatial scales, such as at the county scale in the United States. The absence of rurality or urbanness measures at high spatial resolution poses significant problems when the process of interest is highly localized, as with the incorporation of rural towns and villages into encroaching metropolitan areas. Moreover, existing rural-urban classifications are often inconsistent over time, or require complex, multi-source input data (e.g., remote sensing observations or road network data), thus, prohibiting the longitudinal analysis of rural-urban dynamics. Here, we develop a set of distance- and spatial-network-based methods for consistently estimating the remoteness and rurality of places at fine spatial resolution, over long periods of time. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by constructing indices of urbanness for 30,000 places in the United States from 1930 to 2018 and further test the plausibility of our results against a variety of evaluation datasets. We call these indices the place-level urban-rural index (PLURAL) and make the resulting datasets publicly available (https://doi.org/10.3886/E162941) so that other researchers can conduct long-term, fine-grained analyses of urban and rural change. In addition, due to the simplistic nature of the input data, these methods can be generalized to other time periods or regions of the world, particularly to data-scarce environments.

Who gets left behind by left behind places?

“…Our longitudinal database of places is constructed using place-level census data drawn from the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) and the American Community Survey. The rural components of this dataset were prepared in earlier work (Connor et al, 2022;Hunter et al, 2020;Uhl et al, 2023), which has set the stage for our integrated analysis of urban and rural places. This dataset contains information across a range of place-level demographic and socioeconomic variables in 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2018 for over 20,000 places in the United States.…”

“…This database has been augmented byUhl et al (2023), who developed a continuous urban-rural index that enables identification of urban and rural places. FollowingConnor et al (2022), we define urban paces as those falling below 0.55 on Uhl's index, with rural places scoring above this threshold.…”

Small cities and smart retail

“…We extracted information on the age distribution of communes, as well as their total population and density (in national deciles). While urbaneness and rurality are notoriously difficult to measure (Uhl et al 2022), we use density to characterize the rural-urban continuum here.…”