Sprawl in european cities: the metropolitan peripheries, the main stage of the dispersion of urbanization in Europe?

Abstract

The European territorial political discourse has denounced the increasing artificialized land consumption that generates current processes of urban dispersion. The growing demand for land, over population and economic growth, has become one of the paradigms of territorial development of the first world. Thus, land consumption per capita in agglomerations of more than 500.000 inhabitants, by early of the past decade, reached about 350 m2 of land per capita in Europe and in the more developed world, compared to only about 125 m2 in the rest of the planet. The progressive tendency towards mass consumption of land is of particular concern in large cities, wherever the pressure of urbanization reaches accused levels: to take just one example, while 4,7% of European territory was urbanized in 2000, this proportion had risen to 15,6% in the surroundings of the major European urban regions. This paper seeks to assess the degree of urban sprawl and contrast the features of the different models of land occupation in the main European metropolitan areas. In this context, the work here presented starts from the hypothesis that it is in the European metropolitan peripheries where sprawl pathologies are more pronounced. For this purpose is developed an innovative methodology, based on the notion of Inmpervious Surface Areas, carried out by the NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center of the USA, addressed to the definition not only of their own artifacts to analyze (the areas impacted by the urbanization of major European cities), but also to differentiate their centers and peripheries.