Abstract

co-authored by: Paul Kilgarriff (LISER), Rémi Lemoy (University of Rouen) and Geoffrey Caruso (LISER & University of Luxembourg)

The SCALE-IT-UP project, funded by the FNR CORE scheme, investigates the role of city size, measured in terms of population and artificial land use, on a set of environmental and economic attributes. Re-scaling cities to control for variation in population and land use, allows for relevant comparative analysis. The scaling with population of structural aspects of cities is examined, namely the internal organisation of built-up land, non-built land and transport, thus providing the ability to separate city size effects from urban and transport pattern effects on environmental outcomes. Initial results using radial analysis of 292 European cities show that artificial land use within a rescaled distance of ~ 20km (using London as a reference) to the city centre is decreasing on average across Europe. This is contrasted with further expansion and increase in artificial land use in the suburbs and periphery areas. This finding has important implications relating to the sustainability of our cities as the evidence is pointing to increasing urban sprawl and lower urban centre living. A rescaling component is utilised in the analysis, along with radial profiles to enable comparisons between cities of different populations. The optimal method of clustering artificial land use profiles is explored. This enables us to group similar cities based on internal structure and not population.