THE LEVEL OF URBANIZATION OF A TERRITORY: THE CASE OF SWEDEN

Abstract

Against a background of intensively growing urban population as well as expanding urban network and complicating agglomeration forms, the development of a system of objective indicators that would reflect the level of urbanization of a particular territory remains an unresolved problem. The same applies to the system of corresponding calculations. The paper presents a modified version of the authors’ methodology for determining a territory’s urbanization level through the example of Sweden, taking into consideration the individual national and regional characteristics of the country. The use of a scoring system based on indexing the specially selected indicators made it possible to identify the numerical limits of values necessary for grouping Swedish municipalities into super-urbanized, highly urbanized, and medium-urbanized. A comprehensive methodology proposed by the Russian economic geographer Ernest Faibusovich in 2018 was used as a methodological basis. However, it required significant changes to its components in relation to Sweden, which was due to the differences in the criteria applied in Russia and Sweden to categorize different types of settlements according to their population, due to the size of the territory of the country and its individual municipalities. We also introduced a new indicator for indexing – the share of urban areas in the total area of the region. So far, there have not been any studies presented in scientific literature that would make an attempt to determine the level of a territory’s urbanization based on the example of a foreign state. This work can serve as an impetus for further development of this direction in geo-urban studies, and the methodology used can be taken as an analog base when studying states where the principles of territorial planning are close to the Swedish ones.