Type: Technical Document - July 3, 2020, midnight
ESPON should proceed like OECD and build an original hierarchy of territorial unit. This new hierarchy would not replace the current official definition of Eurostat (NUTS) that is still relevant when works are produced for subjects related to EU regulations like structural funds. But this new hierarchy could be used for strategic planning and more generally work on territorial agenda and cohesion. We propose to generate a coherent hierarchy of functional divisions with 5 levels quoted FUNC1 � FUNC5 where we use the best compromise between conceptual coherence and minimization of cost for collection of data. Starting from a reference level FUNC3 (which could be equivalent to the current NUTS2/3) we focus the analysis of the creation of the level FUNC4 (which is the area of daily activity based on mixture of NUTS3/LAU1) and present more briefly the other levels.