Urban Rural Classification - Scotland

• Published by: Scottish Government SpatialData.gov.scot
• Last updated: 17 December 2024
• Topic: Not added
• Licence: Other Licence ; View licence information

Summary

The Scottish Government (SG) Urban Rural Classification provides a consistent way of defining urban and rural areas across Scotland. The classification aids policy development and the understanding of issues facing urban, rural and remote communities. It is based upon two main criteria:

(i) population as defined by National Records of Scotland (NRS), and (ii) accessibility based on drive time analysis to differentiate between accessible and remote areas in Scotland.

The classification can be analysed in a two, three, six or eight fold form. The two-fold classification simply distinguishes between urban and rural areas through two categories, urban and rural, while the three-fold classification splits the rural category between accessible and remote. Most commonly used is the 6-fold classification which distinguishes between urban, rural, and remote areas through six categories. The 8-fold classification further distinguishes between remote and very remote regions. The Classification is normally updated on a biennial basis, with the current dataset reflective of Census Day 2022. Data for previous versions are available for download in ESRI Shapefile format.

More from this publisher

All datasets from Scottish Government SpatialData.gov.scot

Related datasets

• Rural Urban Classification of Cambridgeshire
• Rural Urban Classification (2011) of MSOAs in EW
• Rural Urban Classification (2011) of Wards in EW
• Rural Urban Classification (2011) of Output Areas in EW

Search

Data links

Link to the data	Format	File added	Data preview
Urban Rural Classification 2011-2012	ZIP	17 December 2024	Not available
Urban Rural Classification 2013-2014	ZIP	17 December 2024	Not available
Urban Rural Classification 2016	ZIP	17 December 2024	Not available
Urban Rural Classification 2020	ZIP	17 December 2024	Not available
Urban Rural Classification 2022	ZIP	17 December 2024	Not available
Topic Page - Scottish Government Website	N/A	17 December 2024	Not available
Urban Rural Classification	N/A	17 December 2024	Not available
SOC:UrbanRural	N/A	17 December 2024	Not available
UrbanRural	N/A	17 December 2024	Not available

Additional information

View additional metadata

• Added to data.gov.uk: 2024-12-16
• Access contraints: Available under the terms of the Open Government Licence. The following attribution statement must be used to acknowledge the source of the information: Copyright Scottish Government, contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right (insert year).
• Harvest GUID: 564db46c-3153-423c-ac84-90d41ec2652c
• Extent: Latitude: 60.87° to 54.63°
• Extent: Longitude: -8.80° to -0.71°
• Dataset reference date: 2024-12-16 (revision)
• Frequency of update: asNeeded
• Responsible party: Scottish Government (pointOfContact, publisher)
• ISO 19139 resource type: dataset
• Metadata language: eng
• Source Metadata: XML
• Source Metadata: HTML

Contact

Enquiries

Scottish Government SpatialData.gov.scot

Licence information

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