Cities in Europe by PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency

Cities in Europe – Facts and figures on cities and urban areas

The publication ‘Cities in Europe’ contains 13 infographics that show facts and figures on recent urban developments in the context of the ‘Europe 2020 strategy’ and the ‘Urban Agenda for the EU’, which aims to strengthen the urban dimension in the European Union. Given the complexities of the urban challenges facing us, we need to explore the opportunities for cross-border collaboration and multi-level coordination. Exploration of new strategies, plans and practices requires, among other things, high-quality data, thorough analysis and clear communication. Visualizing information, e.g. by using infographics or interactive websites, can play a vital part in creating and sharing knowledge. Based on the harmonised definition of urban areas by Eurostat and the OECD, European cities are compared with each other and recent trends are described, such as those in migration, demographic change, risk of urban poverty and urban-rural divergence in employment growth.

In ‘Cities in Europe’ different forms of visualizing information (3D mapping, treemap charts, sankey diagrams, pie charts and bar charts) have been combined with compact explanatory text passages to create a better understanding of complex urban developments through time. Next to the printed publication and the pdf version, we have developed a ‘onepager’ for the web containing a selection of interactive visualizations.