Rural and non-rural municipalities in the Slovak Republic

Identifying rural, non-rural or urban areas in Slovakia, Central Europe, is a complex task for extensive transformation of countryside during the last decades. The processes of suburbanization, which started in Slovakia in the 1990s after the change of the political regime, also contributed to this complexity. Therefore, the identification of rural / urban regions is even more difficult. Our research focuses on the application of a multidimensional approach to delimitation of rural and non-rural areas where the aim is to establish a rurality index that presents a more comprehensive definition of the rurality. We used the Factor Analysis of socio-economic data to show rural and non-rural transitional character of municipalities. The resulting data were assigned to spatial polygons of municipalities of the Slovak Republic and visualized as choropleth maps categorizing the spatial units based on the strength of the rurality. In this way, the spatial aspects of rural vs. non-rural character in Slovakia can be perceived and compared with other sources of spatial information.