Delimitation of urban land: the case of the coast of Alicante in Spain

Abstract

Urban transformation in Spain has been characterized by an increasingly land consumption. A relevant aspect in this issue is the databases used to study the territorial dynamics. In this paper an analysis of two land use databases is performed: Corine Land Cover (CLC) 2000 and other derived from the Study about the transformation of 20 landscapes in Spain in 50 years carried out by the Centre of Land Policy and Valuations. The aim of this analysis is to demonstrate the importance, on the accuracy of information, of scale and land use classification. Also in this paper a methodology, to critically delimitate urbanized areas, finding the borders between rural and consolidated urban paper, is proposed. In such a process GIS and Google Earth tools are implemented, which allows for optimizing the time consumed time in foto interpretation process, which also allows to cut off costs. Results suggest that main differences between databases are concentrated on urban peripheries. At the same time, the complexity of uses on the edge of cities, supposes a great challenge for full automatic recognition processes. Also, due the minim cartographic scale in CLC (25 ha) it results that such a data source is not suitable to study process of urban dispersion; because this scale exclude those areas which surface is inferior to.