Delimiting Rural Areas: Evidence from the Application of Different Methods Elaborated by Italian Scholars

The present text illustrates the methods developed by Italian scholars to delimit rural areas in the period 2005–2020 and compares the relative territorial representations graphically and quantitatively. In that period, Italian scholars experimented with several methods to delimit territories because they are pressed by the desire to find the one that best described the territories, i.e., was both locally relevant and internationally comparable. This pressure originates from the need to map intermediate territories and redesign urban–rural extremes. In addition, it depends on the need to efficiently allocate national and European funds and circumscribe the corresponding program areas. Finally, it is also strongly related to the desire to internationally compare the economic, social, and environmental performance of homogeneous and permanently delimited territories. The text describes the key features of the methods they developed, such as adopted statistical technique and the spatial unit, the processed variables, and the territorial typologies. The results reveal that municipalities and provinces are preferred as spatial units, while economic and demographic indicators are the most used and elaborated through both relatively simple and articulated statistical techniques. The resulting territorial representations show different degrees of ruralization. While some methods design a mostly weakly urban and rural Italy, others completely ignore rural territories. Where they delimit them, the percentage of the population living in each territorial typology varies a lot. No scholars have either applied the methods at an international level or replicated them in other studies.