Zoning in 2012 life basins according to INSEE in the Loiret

The basin of life is the smallest area in which people have access to the most common facilities and services. Its contour is defined in several stages. First, a service hub is defined as an urban municipality or unit with at least 16 of the 31 intermediate facilities. This range of equipment has been retained because it is not present throughout the territory and therefore has a more structuring role. The areas of influence of each service hub are then demarcated by grouping the nearest municipalities, the proximity being measured in travel time, by road at hollow time. Thus, for each municipality and for each equipment not present in the municipality, the nearest municipality offering this equipment is determined. Intermediate equipment as well as local equipment are taken into account. Successive iterations make it possible to draw the perimeter of the basins of life. Compared to urban area zoning, which measures the influence of cities on the basis of commuting between home and work, zoning into living areas complements the analysis of the distribution of facilities and their access. Its main interest is to describe unpopulated spaces, i.e. living areas built on urban units of less than 50,000 inhabitants. The urban-rural typology is based on the classification now used by the European Commission. From 200 m tiles, urban meshes are formed which meet two conditions: a population density of at least 300 inhabitants per km² and a minimum of 5,000 inhabitants. The other meshes are considered to be rural. Therefore, the basins of life were classified into the following three groups: — urban life basin: the population classified in the urban grids represents more than 80 % of the total population in the living basin; — intermediate life basin: the population classified in the urban grids represents between 50 % and 80 % of the total population in the living basin; — rural living area: the population classified in the urban grids represents less than 50 % of the total population in the living basin. The text contrasts rural life basins with intermediate urban and (inferred) basins of life. Lifeshed zoning has been revised as part of an interdepartmental working group of INSEE; the Interministerial Delegation for Regional Planning and Attractiveness (Datar); the Directorate of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (Drees) of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health; the Statistics and Foresight Service (SSP) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, Fisheries, Rurality and Spatial Planning; the Department of Local Studies and Statistics of the Directorate-General of Local Authorities at the Ministry of the Interior (DGCL); and the centre for economics and sociology applied to agriculture and rural areas of the National Institute of Agricultural Research (Inra).