What is it about?
Our results demonstrate that urban sprawl almost doubled between 1990 and 2014 across the globe, increasing by close to 4% per year, with built-up areas growing by almost 28 sqkm per day, or 1.16 sqkm per hour. Europe is the most sprawled of the continents and exhibits the most rapid sprawl increase. Urban sprawl is strongly linked to the level of human development as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI).
Featured Image
Photo by Raphaël Biscaldi on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Urban sprawl has a number of detrimental environmental, economic, and social consequences. Much greater efforts will be needed to use land more sparingly, especially in developed countries. This is an important issue of intergenerational justice because the built-up areas are passed on from one generation to the next. Accordingly, there is urgent need for action to stop urban sprawl. Monitoring urban sprawl can serve to evaluate the effectiveness of urban growth management policies such as greenbelts.
Perspectives
As a remarkable irony in human development of recent decades, we point to the fact that the more knowledge and planning capacities societies have at their disposal, the more common has been the emergence of high urban sprawl. Sustainability in settlement development requires a fundamental transformation of existing planning practices.
Dr. Martin Behnisch
Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER)
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Rapid rise in urban sprawl: Global hotspots and trends since 1990, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, November 2022, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000034.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Urban sprawl in Europe
This report provides a comparable measurement of urban sprawl for 32 European countries at three levels (the country level, the NUTS-2 region level and the 1-km2 cell level) and for two years (2006 and 2009). The analysis is based on the Copernicus system which monitors the Earth and collects data by different sources. The analysis uses new urban sprawl metrics taking into account the way built-up areas are laid out and how they are used. It also looks at the factors which contribute to an increase or decrease in urban sprawl. The results confirm the conclusions of earlier EEA reports namely that in many parts of Europe current levels of urban sprawl have contributed to detrimental ecological, economic and social effects. This gives cause for concern and such effects may increase alongside planned urban development.
How effective are greenbelts at mitigating urban sprawl? A comparative study of 60 European cities
This study compares urban sprawl between cities with and without greenbelts. Greenbelts have largely been effective at reducing urban sprawl. The main mechanism was a reduction of land uptake per person.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
