Abstract
Urban expansion results in socioeconomic transformations with relevant impacts for peri-urban soils, leading to environmental concerns about land degradation and increased desertification risk in ecologically fragile districts. Spatial planning can help achieve sustainable land-use patterns and identify alternative locations for settlements and infrastructure. However, it is sometimes unable to comprehend and manage complex processes in metropolitan developments, fueling unregulated and mainly dispersed urban expansion on land with less stringent building constraints. Using the Mediterranean cities of Barcelona and Rome as examples of intense urbanization and ecological fragility, the present study investigated whether land use planning in these cities is (directly or indirectly) oriented towards conservation of soil quality and mitigation of desertification risk. Empirical results obtained using composite, geo-referenced indices of soil quality (SQI) and sensitivity to land desertification (SDI), integrated with high-resolution land zoning maps, indicated that land devoted to natural and semi-natural uses has lower soil quality in both contexts. The highest values of SDI, indicating high sensitivity to desertification, were observed in fringe areas with medium-high population density and settlement expansion. These findings reveal processes of land take involving buildable soils, sometimes of high quality, and surrounding landscapes in both cities. Overall, the results in this study can help inform land use planers and policymakers for conservation of high-quality soils, especially under weak (or partial) regulatory constraints.
Highlights
Urbanization plays a key role in land take and soil consumption worldwide [1,2]
While the two cities differ in terms of size, population density, urban expansion capacity, and local socio-economic contexts, their experiences of past urban expansion processes are comparable. They are both competent with regard to land use planning and land zoning considerations, which makes them substantially comparable regarding their administrative prerogatives. Their comparison in this study provides a refined overview of the relationship between land use planning, land zoning systems, soil quality, and desertification risk in different morphological and functional contexts across
Toaccurate enable accurate comparison between and Barcelona, it noted that the total amount of natural areas, included in zoning class
Summary
Urbanization plays a key role in land take and soil consumption worldwide [1,2]. Rural areas are the socioeconomic context experiencing the most intense and widely investigated environmental impacts of urbanization [3,4,5]. Rural land is increasingly being converted to residential, commercial, and industrial settlements, producing socially polarized and economically unspecialized spaces, based on empirical evidence collected in both advanced economies and emerging countries [6,7,8]. Recent processes of urban expansion increasingly involve productive and high-quality rural contexts in advanced economies, seriously threatening natural landscapes [9]. Basic notions such as soil quality, land degradation, and desertification risk can be defined and characterized separately [10]. Public Health 2020, 17, 4001; doi:10.3390/ijerph17114001 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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