Urban Areas are a new urban Geography developed by CSO, Tailte Éireann and the Department of Housing. They were generated using an automated process based on Prime2 building counts and constraints on distances between buildings.

Buildings in Urban Areas are within a group of at least 100 buildings and buildings need to be within 65 meters of another building. Building groups of 100 buildings or more must be within 500 meters of each other. A further refinement step was carried out where the Urban Areas were aligned to Small Areas such that Urban areas are groupings of full Small Areas.

Generalised Urban Areas are built from aggregations of corresponding level of generalisation of Small Areas to ensure consistency of boundaries within a given level of generalisation.