Urban sprawl and growth management – drivers, impacts and responses in selected European and US cities

Christian Fertner,Kjell Svenne Bernhard Nilsson,Thomas Alexander Sick Nielsen,Gertrud Jørgensen

doi:10.5334/s40984-016-0022-2

Christian Fertner, Kjell Svenne Bernhard Nilsson + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5334/s40984-016-0022-2

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Abstract

Urban growth management has become a common term to circumscribe strategies and tools to regulate urban land use in metropolitan areas. It is particularly used to counteract negative impacts of urban sprawl but also to frame future urban development. We discuss recent challenges of urban growth in 6 European and 2 US American city-regions. The paper compares the urban development focusing on a quantification of drivers and effects of urban growth and a qualitative analysis of the applied urban growth management tools. We build our analysis on findings from the EU-FP6 project PLUREL. The cities have different success in dealing with urban growth pressure - some can accommodate most growth in existing urban areas and densify, others expand or sprawl. Urban growth management is no guarantee to contain urban growth, but the case studies offer some innovative ways how to deal with particular challenges.

Highlights

Around the world urban areas are growing, increasingly consuming open space [1] and Europe is no exception from this trend [2]
From 1990 to 2006 urban areas in Europe grew by ca. 15000 km2 [3], an increase of urban land of half the size of Belgium within 16 years
As urban sprawl was recognized in the USA several decades ago, it is worth while to look at how American cities have dealt with that phenomenon and how European cities could learn from the US experience

Summary

Introduction

Around the world urban areas are growing, increasingly consuming open space [1] and Europe is no exception from this trend [2]. From 1990 to 2006 urban areas in Europe grew by ca. As urban sprawl was recognized in the USA several decades ago, it is worth while to look at how American cities have dealt with that phenomenon and how European cities could learn from the US experience. At least since the late 1980s, management of urban growth has become an important issue in the USA since the impacts of urban sprawl on environmental sustainability, quality of life and the local economy got recognized [4]. On the background of these developments the term urban growth management has emerged in planning

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