Rural areas differ considerably in their settlement patterns, demographic conditions, accessibility and relationships with nearby towns and cities. Evidence that considers all rural areas together at the scale of a country, or refers to administrative boundaries of rural municipalities or regions does not always capture these differences or the connections between the places where people live, work and access services.
Administrative boundaries remain essential for governing, funding and delivering policies, while OECD territorial classifications provide complementary perspectives. The OECD regional typology, for example, distinguishes between metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions and considers the latter’s access to cities. The Degree of Urbanisation identifies whether individual settlements and local areas are cities, towns and semi-dense areas, or rural areas. The former provides a broad regional view and the latter a detailed picture of settlement patterns. Neither is designed to show how all local areas beyond cities connect to form daily systems.
The functional approaches examined in this report provide an additional, internationally comparable perspective. They are intended to complement – not replace – national rural definitions and administrative boundaries, which remain essential for domestic policy design, funding and implementation.
The OECD and the European Commission have already developed Functional Urban Areas (FUAs), which typically bring together several municipalities to capture cities together with the surrounding areas from which people commute to them. This report asks how a comparable functional perspective can be applied across the rest of the national territory. It examines three approaches, each of which views everyday connections through a different lens:
Labour Market Areas (LMAs) bring together places that are closely connected by journeys to work. They use information on where people live and where they work.
France’s Bassins de Vie bring together places whose residents rely on the same nearby services, such as schools, healthcare and shops. They estimate which services people can reach using the road network.
Functional Rural Areas (FRAs) bring together rural places beyond FUAs, based on how long it takes to reach nearby population centres and according to the assumption that different functions, including jobs and services, happen in connection to trips linked to population centres.
No approach captures every dimension of everyday life in detail. A labour-market geography may be best suited to questions about employment and commuting, while a service-based geography may be more relevant for planning healthcare or education. An accessibility-based approach can be applied consistently even where detailed information on actual journeys or service locations is unavailable. The report therefore does not seek to identify one universally “correct” map of rural daily systems. Instead, it asks whether each approach captures meaningful connections and what advantages it offers for different analytical and policy purposes.
To answer these questions, the report compares the three approaches using a common set of measures. It examines how many journeys remain within each daily system, how strongly the places inside it are connected, whether it contains a reasonable balance between workers and jobs, and whether the resulting areas are broadly comparable in size. The report also compares the three approaches with randomly generated maps that group neighbouring municipalities without using information about commuting, services or accessibility. This provides a benchmark for determining whether the proposed daily systems capture more than geographic proximity alone.
The results show that all three approaches identify meaningful functional relationships. Labour Market Areas and FRAs combined with FUAs generally capture more internal travel and stronger connections than the randomly generated alternatives. Bassins de Vie, although considerably smaller and more numerous, also reveal meaningful spatial patterns when compared with randomly generated areas of a similar size. No approach performs consistently better across every measure and country.
The report complements this assessment with mobile phone data for a selection of countries. Unlike conventional commuting statistics, these data capture journeys for shopping, services, education and leisure as well as work. They show that the organisation of mobility varies by trip purpose: work trips are more likely to connect different municipalities within the same functional area, while other trips may remain more local or cross functional-area boundaries. Nevertheless, where Labour Market Areas and FRAs combined with FUAs can be compared on a similar basis, they perform broadly alike in capturing both work and non-work mobility.
The report then illustrates how functional areas can support comparative territorial analysis. It uses FRAs together with FUAs to examine demographic, housing, accessibility, digital connectivity, environmental and land-use indicators across OECD countries. FRAs were selected for this exercise for practical reasons because they are easy to obtain for all OECD countries in an internationally comparable way, without taking any stand on the theoretical preferability of the three approaches.
This analysis shows clear differences across functional rural areas with different degrees of rurality, providing new and more precise estimates. Demographic pressures intensify as areas become more rural: the number of older people relative to the working-age population rises, while the share of foreign-born residents, a potential source of demographic renewal, declines. Access to hospitals and fixed internet speeds also deteriorate as areas become more rural, reducing the scope for digital services to compensate for weaker physical access. Housing markets follow a similar pattern: the more rural an area is, the more likely homes are to stand empty and the lower rents tend to be.
Per-capita greenhouse gas emissions are highest in the most rural areas. This reflects both higher per capita emissions for transport and housing, as well as the concentration of power generation, agriculture and other emissions-intensive activities in rural places, even though their output serves the wider economy. At the same time, these areas have recorded the largest reductions in emissions since 2010, driven mainly by a move to renewable energy in the power sector.
Comparing FRAs by population trajectory reveals an additional challenge. Built-up areas expanded not only in growing and stable FRAs, but also in those losing population. This means that population decline does not necessarily reduce the area over which roads, utilities and public services must be maintained, potentially increasing their cost per resident.
These findings broadly confirm patterns identified in previous OECD analysis, while showing what a functional perspective can add. Internationally comparable functional areas can strengthen cross-country analysis and bring territorial evidence closer to people’s lived experience. They can help identify where access to jobs and services supports the ability of residents to stay and thrive, and where structural gaps require policy attention. Continued collaboration with OECD member countries will support further testing and refinement of these approaches, including their potential application to cross-border daily systems, and strengthen the evidence base for policies that recognise the diversity and interconnectedness of rural and urban territories.