Indiapolis

Following the Geopolis guidelines, the dataset provides the shapefile of all physical agglomerates of over 5,000 inhabitants as urban in India in 2010 with their population data of 2001 and 2011 – an agglomerate being considered as a contiguous built-up area. The objective of the e-Geopolis project is to promote the use of a single, globally applicable technical definition of the term. This approach is based on:

• a simple morphological criterion across space and time: (the contiguity of built-up areas with a maximum of 200 meters separating constructions), and

• a single threshold (10,000 inhabitants) applied uniformly across the board, even when the national definition uses other criteria

• 6,485 morphological agglomerate’s polygons with at least 10,000 inhabitants in 2001 considered urban are delineated

• as well as smaller morphological agglomerates above 5,000 inhabitants in 2001.

Geopolis definition eliminates the technical or methodological biases of the official definition, linked in the case of India to the problem of the spread of an agglomeration over different administrative units either officially rural or urban and/or crossing State borders.  Having carried out the necessary processes of standardization on a diachronic set of data, verification on the ground and digitalization of each morphological configuration, we can now offer a scientifically valid view of India’s urban continuum. These steps have eliminated most (if not all) of the distortions resulting from an unquestioning dependence on official figures, besides attempting a classical analysis of demographic trends.

Delineation of agglomerates has been made using GoogleEarth imagery.

see: 

Denis, E., & Marius-Gnanou, K. (2010). Toward a better appraisal of urbanization in India. A fresh look at the landscape of morphological agglomerates. Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography.