When we introduced Small City Mapping, our goal was to help customers work at the right level of geographic granularity, mapping smaller cities and suburbs to the major metropolitan areas they belong to so teams can target key markets without manually managing every surrounding city or neighborhood.
Today, we’re introducing the first round of enhancements to our Big City/Small City Offering, delivered through the existing Small City Mapping decode file available in the Support Portal. Rather than simply expanding coverage, we’ve rebuilt how metropolitan relationships are defined across 25 priority countries using country-specific research and authoritative statistical sources.
This work reflects a significant, ongoing investment of time, research, and resources in strengthening our worldwide geographic intelligence, bringing more local context to our existing data and laying the foundation for additional refinements in future releases. That investment has enabled Digital Element to become the only provider offering Big City/Small City mapping built through country-specific research and authoritative statistical sources. We make that investment for a simple reason: better data drives better outcomes for our customers.
Refining How “Big” and “Small” Are Defined
Our original mappings were developed using a standardized methodology applied consistently across countries, providing efficient worldwide coverage and a common framework for classification.
As we’ve continued working with customers around the world, we recognized an opportunity to go further. Metropolitan regions are defined differently from one country to the next, and a single global methodology can’t always capture those local distinctions.
For each of the 25 countries included in this release, our team invested in original, country-by-country research, working directly from authoritative government and statistical sources to determine:
- which cities should serve as major metropolitan centers
- how surrounding cities, suburbs, and municipalities should be associated with those markets
The result is a significant refinement of our existing Big City/Small City mappings that better reflects how metropolitan regions are actually organized within each country. It’s one example of our continued investment in improving geographic intelligence as customer needs evolve.
The First 25 Countries
This round targets the countries that either have Metro-level support within NetAcuity today or where we see clear customer demand:
Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Vietnam.
Additional countries already planned as this initiative expands across our worldwide coverage.
Big City/Small City Mapping Example: France
France illustrates the scale of the refinement. The previous mapping classified 320 French cities as “big.” Rebuilding the mapping against INSEE‘s Urban Attraction Areas (AAV 2020), France’s official statistical geography for urban influence zones, produced a revised list of 172 big cities, with the remainder correctly reassigned as small cities tied to the appropriate metropolitan area.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big Cities | 320 | 172 | −148 |
| Small Cities | 30,106 | 30,261 | +155 |
| Total Rows | 30,447 | 30,447 | — |
While every country requires a different methodology, France demonstrates the impact of applying country-specific research instead of relying on a single global approach. Similar refinements were made throughout this first group of countries using each nation’s own authoritative geographic definitions.
France was not unique. We observed similar patterns across the countries reviewed, reinforcing the value of aligning each country’s mappings with authoritative local statistical sources.
What This Means for You
No action is required to benefit from these refinements:
- Same file, better data. There is no new file or product name — the existing Small City Mapping decode file on the Support Portal will be updated with the revised mappings.
- Preview available. If you’d like to review the changes before they go live, we can provide before-and-after versions of the Small City Mapping decode file. Contact your Client Success representative.
- Feature Code 93 included. If you use the NetAcuity Server with Feature Code 93 (the Decode DB), all fields sourced from the Small City Mapping decode file will automatically reflect the refined big/small mappings.
A Stronger Foundation for Every Use Case
These enhancements are about more than refining city classifications. They reflect the substantial time and resources Digital Element continually invests in its data—building geographic intelligence, country by country, through original research no off-the-shelf dataset replicates. We do that work so our customers get more accurate results from the same products they already use.
As additional countries are incorporated into this initiative, customers will continue to benefit from richer local context without changing the way they access or use Small City Mapping.
This is the first step in a broader effort to continually strengthen our worldwide geographic data—an investment that pays off where it matters most: helping customers make better location-based decisions with greater confidence.
Contact your Digital Element Client Success Representative to learn more or request a before-and-after review of the refined mappings.
