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

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. We developed 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. Based on these methods, we constructed indices of urbanness for 30,000 places in the United States from 1930 to 2018. We call these indices the place-level urban-rural index (PLURAL), enabling long-term, fine-grained analyses of urban and rural change in the United States.

The following publications relate in an unspecified way to the data in this project.

• Uhl, Johannes H., Stefan Leyk, Lori M. Hunter, Catherine B. Talbot, Dylan S. Connor, Jeremiah J. Nieves, and Myron Gutmann. “A Fine-Grained, Versatile Index of Remoteness to Characterize Place-Level Rurality.” In Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA). online, 2021. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.08496.