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Exploring the patterns of urban growth across 26 European countries 2767
the explicit national and regional in uence on urban land-use change and its physical shape
is rare. The few studies that do exist provide further evidence for the remarkable differences
in urbanisation patterns that can be observed, but also for common aspects like the ongoing
conversion of nonurban land to urban land uses and the decrease of urban densities (Angel
2011; Huang et al, 2007; Kasanko et al, 2006; Schneider and Woodcock 2008; Schwarz
2010).
We argue that the lack of international comparative studies on the intensity and spatial
coverage of urban sprawl constrains the understanding of the economic, social, and political
drivers of sprawl. While demographic and economic trends are usually well documented, few
studies focus on the per capita amount of urbanised land, the rates of growth, and the spatial
patterns of urban expansion in different world regions and countries (EEA, 2006a; Schneider
and Woodcock, 2008). We simply do not know exactly how industrialised countries and their
metropolitan areas compare internationally in terms of sprawl patterns.
With this background, this paper aims to improve the understanding of urban landuse
change by comparing urban development patterns in European countries. We present
results of a comparative measurement and assessment of urban form and urban growth
across twenty-six nations, most of them EU member states. For this purpose, we employ
a set of commonly used and well-documented indicators. The selected measures refer to
(a) the spatial extent of urban land uses and the rates of land conversion to urban uses; (b)
the compactness of urban areas and the spatial dispersion of new development; and (c)
urban density. By using land-use data for different points in time, the analysis is both crosssectional
and longitudinal. The main part (section 3) of this paper presents the empirical
ndings for eight static and dynamic indicators for the years 1990, 2000, and 2006. In order
to avoid scaling issues and allow for comparability of indicators based on different data
sources, a polygon layer containing 20 × 20 km squares was used for the nal visualisation
of indicator results. All outputs were aggregated to this grid and to the national level.
The paper is organised in four sections. In section 2 the methodological approach is
introduced. This includes a brief introduction into the conceptual approach regarding the
measurement of urban sprawl and the data sources used. The methods that were used to map
urban form patterns are also covered in section 2. Section 3 provides a detailed overview of
the empirical results, which are discussed in more detail in section 4.
2 Methodological approach
This study presents data on urban land use (also referred to as arti cial or built-up land)
and its change over time in the form of cross-national statistics and maps. Indicators were
calculated for the years 1990, 2000, and 2006, for twenty- ve of the current European Union
member states, plus Croatia, a candidate country at the time of the data release. The most
regrettable data gaps were the CORINE updates for the UK and Greece for 2006, and the
CORINE data for Latvia, Finland, and Sweden for 1990.
2.1 Indicators for measuring urban form
Our choice of indicators is based on a conceptual framework distinguishing three key
dimensions of urban sprawl [see table 1 and Siedentop and Fina (2010) for details]:
land-use composition as the proportion of urban land uses with mostly arti cial surfaces
(composition dimension),
land-use pattern as the spatial con guration of urban land-use patches (pattern dimension),
and
urban density as a measure of land-use intensity (density dimension).