Hi Christina,

One option is to use Canada Post's estimation, which is embedded in
the "forward sortation area" part of the post code (i.e., the first
three characters).  See later in the page here for a good primer on
their approach:  http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/postal-ca.html

"The second character of the FSA (the digit) identifies whether the
CPC is for a rural or urban area. A zero (0) indicates a rural area,
while any other digit 1 through 9 represents a (comparatively) urban
area. On occasion, as some rural localities grow and expand, their
postal codes are changed to reflect that they have "graduated" from
being considered rural to urban. This happened recently to a few
communities in New Brunswick. The process of converting an area from
"rural" to "urban" postal codes has a formal name: "urbanization."
This is, of course, an extremely specific use of the word as compared
to the general sense."

There are bound to be multiple definitions from the fields of
geography and sociology too.

Ketan.



Ketan Shankardass, PhD

-
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Wilfrid Laurier University
-
Associate Scientist
Centre for Research on Inner City Health
in the Keenan Research Centre
of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute
of St. Michael’s Hospital



On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Christina Vlahopoulos
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi All SDOHers,
>     I was wondering if anyone had any great resources or pieces of
> literature defining what is meant by rural vs urban - I am writing a
> research paper and need to clearly define what is meant by "rural" and what
> is meant by "urban".
>
> With your help I can then allocate places and postal codes into the two
> categories and look at health discrepancies between the two with the data I
> have.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Best,
> Christina
>
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________
>
> Christina Vlahopoulos
>
>
> Think about the environment before printing.
>
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