DG Regional Policy faces an increasing demand for EU-wide, harmonised regional and urban data analysis. Although a lot of data and indicators are collected at regional level and at the level of bigger cities and agglomerations, the geographical distribution of population at local level has proven to be an essential additional data source when analysing the diversity of the territories in Europe. 
In order to enable a broader historical perspective on the population evolution of territories and agglomerations, DG Regional Policy aims to establish a database with the population figures for the local administrative units of 2011 and their population figures per decade starting in 1960 covering the whole EU27, the EFTA countries and the current EU candidate countries.