The European Urban Atlas is part of the local component of the GMES/Copernicus land monitoring services. It provides reliable, inter-comparable, high-resolution land use maps for 695 Functional Urban Area (FUA) and their surroundings (more than 50,000 inhabitants) for the reference year 2012. The GIS data can be downloaded together with a map for each urban area covered and a report with the metadata.\n\nThe interactive map content is scale dependent. The urban land use is visible at scales greater than 1:750,000. Below that scale, the map shows the Large Urban Zones.

The Urban Atlas is providing pan-European comparable land use and land cover data for Functional Urban Areas (FUA). The Urban Atlas is a joint initiative of the European Commission Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy and the Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry with the support of the European Space Agency and the European Environment Agency.\n\nChange layers are only available for all FUAs that have been covered in both 2006 and 2012.

The Urban Atlas is part of the implementation of the Global Monitoring of Environment and Security (GMES) service. Compiled from thousands of satellite photographs, the Urban Atlas provides detailed and cost-effective digital mapping. The Urban Atlas will enable urban planners and the public to assess risks and opportunities, ranging from threat of flooding and impact of climate change, and to identifying new infrastructure needs. All cities in the EU will be covered by the Urban Atlas by 2011. This map will provide for the first time homogeneous and up-to-date information on urban environments, allowing for a comparison of different cities all across Europe. Data source: http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/urban-atlas