To grow or to sprawl? Land Cover Relationships in a Mediterranean City Region and implications for land use management

Several Mediterranean cities underwent important morphological changes in the last century. This article deals with the transition from compact towards dispersed urban form and the consequent changes in Land Cover Relationships (LCRs) observed from 1960 to 2009 in Attica (Greece), a mono-centric, dense city region. We analyzed the long-term spatial distribution of four basic land cover classes to test if the ‘compact growth’ observed up to early 1990s and the ‘sprawl’ observed afterwards differently affect LCRs. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and multivariate procedures were used to verify this hypothesis. Results put in evidence similarities and differences in Land Cover Changes (LCCs) and LCRs observed during the two urban phases. Per-capita built-up area was found significantly higher in the ‘sprawl’ than in ‘compact growth’ phase. Cropland was the land cover class with the highest probability to undergo edification in both periods, but a significant conversion rate from forests towards cropland and pastures (in turn converted into built-up areas) was also observed in the ‘sprawl’ phase. This may be considered an indirect effect of urbanization due to sprawl-driven land fragmentation and recurrent fires induced by illegal housing and land speculation. We finally discussed how the changing LCRs may represent, at regional scale, a possible target for policies mitigating land consumption in ‘shrinking’ Mediterranean cities.

[1]  Amy M. Lerner,et al.  Adaptive capacity in evolving peri-urban spaces: Responses to flood risk in the Upper Lerma River Valley, Mexico , 2010 .

[2]  John Sayas,et al.  New Facets of Urban Segregation in Southern Europe , 2009 .

[3]  G. Petschel-Held,et al.  Urban Sprawl in Europe , 2007 .

[4]  A. Gospodini.  Post-industrial Trajectories of Mediterranean European Cities: The Case of Post-Olympics Athens , 2009 .

[5]  Robert Bruegmann.  Sprawl: A Compact History , 2005 .

[6]  Lila Leontidou.  The Mediterranean city in transition: Freface , 1990 .

[7]  H. Coccossis.  Historical Land Use Changes: Mediterranean Regions of Europe , 1991 .

[8]  J. Latorre,et al.  Dealing with aridity: socio-economic structures and environmental changes in an arid Mediterranean region , 2001 .

[9]  Sedat Keleş,et al.  Evaluating urbanization, fragmentation and land use/land cover change pattern in Istanbul city, Turkey from 1971 TO 2002 , 2008 .

[10]  V. Mykhnenko,et al.  The trajectories of European cities, 1960–2005 , 2007 .

[11]  Joan Marull,et al.  Erratum to “A GIS methodology for assessing ecological connectivity: Application to the Barcelona Metropolitan Area” [Landscape Urban Plan 71(2–4):243–262] , 2005 .

[12]  Antonio Leone,et al.  Land cover and land use change in the Italian central Apennines: A comparison of assessment methods , 2009 .

[13]  Antoni Durà-Guimerà.  Population deconcentration and social restructuring in Barcelona, a European Mediterranean city , 2003 .

[14]  E. Soja,et al.  Global city regions , 2001 .

[15]  T. Panayotou.  Environmental Sustainability and Services in Developing Global City Regions , 2000 .

[16]  B. A. Portnova,et al.  Combating desertification in the Negev : dryland agriculture vs . dryland urbanization , 2004 .

[17]  Duccio Rocchini,et al.  Human activity impact on the heterogeneity of a Mediterranean landscape , 2010 .

[18]  J. Thornes,et al.  Atlas of Mediterranean Environments in Europe , 1999 .

[19]  Joan Marull,et al.  Social metabolism, landscape change and land-use planning in the , 2010 .

[20]  E. Economidou.  The Attic landscape throughout the centuries and its human degradation , 1993 .

[21]  L. Salvati,et al.  Soil Sealing in the Growing City: A Survey in Rome, Italy , 2010 .

[22]  M. Antrop.  Landscape change and the urbanization process in Europe , 2004 .

[23]  Gerhard Petschel-Held,et al.  Urban sprawl in Europe : landscapes, land-use change & policy , 2007 .

[24]  Adrián Guillermo Aguilar,et al.  Peri-urbanization, illegal settlements and environmental impact in Mexico City , 2008 .

[25]  Douglas L. Johnson,et al.  Land Degradation: Creation and Destruction , 1995 .

[26]  W. Filho,et al.  An overview of urban-rural land use interactions in Greece , 2008 .

[27]  Fatih Terzi,et al.  Urban Sprawl Measurement of Istanbul , 2009 .

[28]  A. Gospodini.  Portraying, classifying and understanding the emerging landscapes in the post-industrial city , 2006 .

[29]  L. Salvati,et al.  Exploring long-term land cover changes in an urban region of southern Europe , 2011 .

[30]  Antonio Musolesi,et al.  European cities in the process of economic integration: towards structural convergence , 2007 .

[31]  M. Tonts,et al.  Containing Urban Sprawl: Trends in Land Use and Spatial Planning in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona , 2005 .

[32]  O. Christopoulou,et al.  Peri‐urban and urban forests in Greece: obstacle or advantage to urban development? , 2007 .

[33]  D. Saurí,et al.  Urban sprawl in the Mediterranean?: Patterns of growth and change in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region 1993–2000 , 2008 .

[34]  R. Camagni.  The economic role and spatial contradictions of global city-regions: the functional, cognitive and evolutionary context , 2001 .

[35]  Francesc M. Munoz.  Lock living: Urban sprawl in Mediterranean cities , 2003 .

[36]  A. Soliman.  Regional planning scenarios in South Lebanon: the challenge of rural–urban interactions in the era of liberation and globalization , 2004 .

[37]  H. Alphan.  Land‐use change and urbanization of Adana, Turkey , 2003 .

[38]  F. Brouwer,et al.  Land Use Changes in Europe , 1991 .

[39]  H Briassoulis,et al.  Policy-Oriented Integrated Analysis of Land-Use Change: An Analysis of Data Needs , 2001, Environmental management.

[40]  José I. Barredo,et al.  Are European Cities Becoming Dispersed? A Comparative Analysis of 15 European Urban Areas , 2006 .

[41]  Y. Auda,et al.  Landscape spatial dynamics over 38 years under natural and anthropogenic pressures in Mount Lebanon , 2008 .

[42]  Christiane Weber,et al.  Urban development in the Athens metropolitan area using remote sensing data with supervised analysis and GIS , 2005 .

[43]  P. Delladetsima.  The Emerging Property Development Pattern in Greece and its Impact on Spatial Development , 2006 .

[44]  E. Lambin,et al.  Impact of data integration technique on historical land-use/land-cover change: Comparing historical maps with remote sensing data in the Belgian Ardennes , 2002, Landscape Ecology.

[45]  Charalabos Ioannidis,et al.  Towards a strategy for control of suburban informal buildings through automatic change detection , 2009, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[46]  Dieter D. Genske.  Urban Land: Degradation - Investigation - Remediation , 2010 .

[47]  L. Salvati,et al.  Territorial disparities, natural resource distribution, and land degradation: a case study in southern Europe , 2007 .

[48]  M. Antrop.  Changing patterns in the urbanized countryside of Western Europe , 2000, Landscape Ecology.

[49]  Christiane Weber,et al.  Urbanization pressure and modeling of urban growth: example of the Tunis Metropolitan Area , 2003 .

[50]  P. Kanaroglou,et al.  Three decades of urban growth in the city of Shiraz, Iran: A remote sensing and geographic information systems application , 2011 .

[51]  Robert Sabatier,et al.  The ACT (STATIS method) , 1994 .

[52]  Konstantinos G. Nikolakopoulos,et al.  Monitoring the urban expansion of Athens using remote sensing and GIS techniques in the last 35 years , 2005, SPIE Remote Sensing.

[53]  C. Woodcock,et al.  Compact, Dispersed, Fragmented, Extensive? A Comparison of Urban Growth in Twenty-five Global Cities using Remotely Sensed Data, Pattern Metrics and Census Information , 2008 .

[54]  Lorne H. Russwurm,et al.  The City's Countryside: Land And Its Management In The Rural Urban Fringe , 1983 .

[55]  Chang-Hee Christine Bae,et al.  Urban Sprawl in Western Europe and the United States , 2004 .

[56]  Georgia Giannakourou.  Transforming spatial planning policy in Mediterranean countries: Europeanization and domestic change , 2005 .

[57]  Sotirios Koukoulas,et al.  Planning, competitiveness and sprawl in the Mediterranean city: The case of Athens , 2010 .

[58]  Other.  Urban sprawl in Europe: the ignored challenge , 2006 .

[59]  H. Tanrıvermiş,et al.  Agricultural land use change and sustainable use of land resources in the mediterranean region of Turkey , 2003 .

[60]  V. Hansen.  C. R. Bryant, L. H. Russwurm, A. G. Me Lei lan: The city's countryside, land and its management in the rural-urban fringe. Longman, London 1982. XII, 249 s. fig. 24 cm. £7.95. , 1984 .