The CityLoops cities are each situated and therefore also nested in their respective territories, regions and countries. As part of the Sector-Wide Circularity Assessment, they have collected data (in an online course) on these different spatial scales.

Official titles of NUTS levels and the respective amounts of each

The various links lead to the Wikipedia articles for each of the countries and their respective NUTS levels, if those exist. (Source of the content)

Name and code of each NUTS level

The table is an overview of the NUTS levels for each of the CityLoops cities. For NUTS 2 and NUTS 3, these reference spaces already exist in the system. They are spelled exactly as stated here (capitalisation, spaces etc.), so be sure to use that exact name for the system to recognise it when you upload spreadsheet data.

Name and code of the Local Administrative Units (LAU)

The Local Administrative Units come from here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/local-administrative-units

Background of spatial scale classification

"In all traditional material flow accounting methods, one of the first steps is to define a system boundary, both in space and time, where flows enter and exit from, and stocks stay within. In the case of CityLoops, the system boundary coincides with urban administrative boundaries as this is where most information/data is available but also where their jurisdiction often ends.

At a European level, various spatial levels were created to collect data on, in order to highlight specific territorial aspects of regions and cities. These levels zoom further in from member states level as they enable them to compare similarly inhabited or similar areas of land. The main hierarchical categorisation of territorial statistics is the so-called Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) classification going from the country to smaller and smaller regions and territories namely NUTS 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Table 10 provides the name and number of each of these NUTS levels for the seven demonstrator cities of CityLoops.

Table 11 states the respective names and codes of the NUTS levels that the cities are nested in. As can be seen from that table, the biggest cities, such as Porto and Seville sometimes coincide with their NUTS 3 boundaries, but in most cases that smallest NUTS level is still too big and a smaller territorial scale is needed.

This is where Local Administrative Units (LAUs) can be taken advantage of since they are compatible with NUTS levels (through specific correspondence tables). In this case, almost all cities have a corresponding LAU, except Porto which has several (Table 12). That table contains what appear to be the boundaries that best reflect the urban administrations for the seven demonstrator cities of CityLoops."

(Source: excerpt from WP4 Deliverable 4.3 Sector-Wide Circularity Assessment Method (p. 37)).