Defining urban and rural areas for South Africa has a long history. It still remains relevant today, forming an
integral part of the country?s growth and development strategies. The definition of the dichotomy is the first step
towards understanding the dynamics in these areas and for effective policy implementation. No standard definition
exists for the country. Several definitions are used based on the type of application, for example, the provision of
water and sanitation services in the former homelands in South Africa, where the former homelands were referred
to as rural. In the case of Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), enumeration areas (EAs) demarcated for the censuses
were assigned geographical characteristics that describes the type of geographical area it resided in mainly based on
administrative boundaries and aerial photograph interpretation (called EA-types and Geography-types). EAs were
classified according to these to give some indication of urban (and non-urban). The other evolving trend in the
country is to move away from defining urban and rural areas; to rather base policy on settlement typologies that
classify cities and towns in the country based on size, function and institutional legacy.
This paper explores yet another way of defining urban and rural, that of using census enumeration areas, census
data and selected statistical methods to classify urban and rural for South Africa. It begins by summarising the
results obtained from a study conducted by Laldaparsad (2006) using the 2001 census data; the methods are applied
to the 2011 census data, followed by discussion on the usefulness of the methods and results.