Beyond the urban-rural dichotomy: Towards a more nuanced analysis of changes in built-up land

Abstract

Urban land and rural land are typically represented as homogenous and mutually exclusive classes in land change analyses. As a result, differences in urban land use intensity, as well as mosaic landscapes combining urban and rural land uses are not represented. In this study we explore the distribution of urban land and urban land use intensity in Europe and the changes therein. Specifically, we analyze the distribution of built-up land within pixels of 1 km 2. At that resolution we find that most built-up land is distributed over predominantly nonbuilt-up pixels. Consistently, we find that most urban land use changes between 2000 and 2014 come in small incremental changes, rather than sudden large-scale conversions from rural to urban land. Using urban population densities, we find that urban land use intensity varies strongly across 1 km 2 pixels in Europe, as illustrated by a coefficient of variation of 85%. We found a similarly high variation between urban population densities for most individual countries and within areas with the same share of built-up land. Population changes have led to different combinations of urban land expansion and urban intensity changes in different study periods (1975-1990, 1990-2000, and 2000-2015) and countries. These findings suggest that land use change models could be improved by more nuanced representations of urban land, including mosaic classes and different urban land use intensities.

Direct and indirect loss of natural area from urban expansion

“…Land use and land use change are pivotal in many sustainability challenges, and model-based assessments are elementary in analyzing possible solutions 47,48 . Yet, the representation of urban systems in land use models is rather simplistic, in contrast to the modelling of agricultural and natural land systems 49,50 . As a consequence, the potential of alternative urban development trajectories to mitigate direct and indirect land cover change, as well as related environmental impacts, remains to be investigated.…”

The peri-urbanization of Europe: A systematic review of a multifaceted process

“…In different areas of the world this development has different character, ranging from new sub-urban development at the edge of large cities (Theobald, 2005) to the infill of rural areas due to the expansion of villages and towns surrounding cities (Schneider, Chang, & Paulsen, 2015). As a consequence, large parts of Europe cannot be described as strictly urban or strictly rural (van Vliet, Verburg, Grădinaru, & Hersperger, 2019). These territories-in-between, often called peri-urban areas (PUA), combine elements of both urban and rural land (Wandl, Nadin, Zonneveld, & Rooij, 2014) and are characterized as emergent, dynamic, socially heterogeneous, and areas associated with often competing land use practices and demands (Hedblom, Andersson, & Borgström, 2017).…”

Bridging the rural-urban dichotomy in land use science

“…Also in Europe, the majority of the built-up land is found in areas that are predominantly rural, i.e. with more than half of the area categorized as non-built-up areas (Van Vliet et al, 2019). Based on these observations, we argue that pixels with one homogenous land cover type are not the right unit of analysis for these processes and that landscapes should be characterized as heterogeneous units along the rural-urban gradient (see e.g., Schug et al, 2020).…”