Unraveling Latent Aspects of Urban Expansion: Desertification Risk Reveals More.

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.

Horizontal vs vertical growth: Understanding latent patterns of urban expansion in large metropolitan regions.

Building activity at the metropolitan scale reflects socioeconomic transformations increasingly dependent on place-specific factors. The present study investigates height profile and age of buildings over 12 time intervals (1910s-2010s) in Greece, a country experiencing particularly complex urban cycles in the last century, with the aim to identify distinctive forces fueling vertical and horizontal urban expansion. To discriminate vertical from horizontal expansion, a new indicator of urban growth ('Vertical-to-Horizontal Growth' ratio, VHG) was proposed and used to identify the dominant socioeconomic profile underlying local-scale urbanization processes.

Do spatial patterns of urbanization and land consumption reflect different socioeconomic contexts in Europe?

Land-use changes and urban sprawl have transformed European cities, with a direct impact on both metropolitan structures and socioeconomic functions. However, these processes tend to be relatively different across countries, being influenced by place-specific factors associated to socioeconomic, historical, political and cultural factors that influence decisions on the use of land. Considering 155 metropolitan areas in 6 European macro-regions, the present study investigates spatial patterns of land consumption profiling cities according to a large set of territorial variables, with the final objective to identify relevant socioeconomic dimensions characteristic of recent processes of urban growth.