Membership of Czech municipalities to rural and urban areas: a fuzzy-based approach

Abstract

Due to the ongoing changes in settlement, it is becoming increasingly difficult to properly define rural and urban areas in Czechia. This delimitation problem has been intensively studied in Europe, including Czechia, for decades, but only the “crisp” rules have been set for this purpose. This is no longer sufficient because of substantial population movements. Our research focused on applying the fuzzy set theory to the delimitation of rural and urban areas and on a subsequent visualization and statistical comparison. This paper focuses on an introduction of such approaches and aims to present the chances of using geocomputational methods in geographical research. The main result is a new methodology that applies the principles of fuzzy approach (fuzzy sets and numbers operations, fuzzy regulation) on socio-economic data to show the transitional character of municipalities. Two ways of fuzzy approach, the easy-to-obtain Łukasiewicz T-norm and the more complex fuzzy regulation, are used in order to demonstrate its advantage over the Boolean logic procedure in the delimitation of rural and urban areas.