I'm trying to make a map like this for the Low Countries/Rhineland, where I basically show how spread out all the urban areas would be there if the urban areas had similar densities to American urban areas. I have all the data I need for the UK and for the Netherlands, but I can't find all the data I need for France or Germany or, in particular, Belgium. For each of those countries, I'm looking for:
- a shapefile of the boundaries of all the built-up/urban areas in that country (as opposed to metropolitan areas or administrative city boundaries), which includes data of the population and area (or density) of each of those built-up areas
- a shapefile of the boundaries of the smallest subdivisions possible for that country (akin to Local Super Output Areas for the UK or Buurten for the Netherlands), which includes data of the population and area (or density) of each of those subdivisions, and preferably also the population centroids of each of the subdivisions. I've found a 1km^2 grid for Germany, but not for the other two countries.
Does anyone know where I could get these shapefiles?
I would prefer shapefiles based on 2011 census data. I've looked on Eurostat, but they don't have built-up area shapefiles, and they only do detailed shapefiles for the whole of the EU put together, which my computer isn't powerful enough to cope with.