341R_Global urban structure growth shows a profound shift from spreading out to building up (research summary)

What is The Future for Cities?

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14d ago 15:10

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Are you interested in urban expansion shifts across 3 decades?

Summary of the article titled Global urban structure growth shows a profound shift from spreading out to building up from 2024, by Steve Frolking, Richa Mahtta, Tom Milliman, Thomas Esch, and Karen C. Seto, published in the Nature Cities journal.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Keller Easterling in episode 342 talking about spatial politics and urban infrastructure.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see global urban structural growth across time and its implications. This article introduces the shift from horizontal to vertical expansion and its effects on resource use, climate and urban living.

Find the article through this link.

Abstract: We present a new study examining the dynamics of global urban building growth rates over the past three decades. By combining datasets for 1,550+ cities from several space-borne sensors—data from three scatterometers and settlement-built fraction based on Landsat-derived data—we find profound shifts in how cities expanded from the 1990s to the 2010s. Cities had both increasing building fractional cover and increasing microwave backscatter (correlating with building volume), but over the three decades, growth rates in building fraction decreased in most regions and large cities, while growth rates in backscatter increased in essentially all regions and cities. The divergence in rates of increase of these metrics indicates a shift from lateral urban expansion to more vertical urban development. This transition has happened in different decades and to different extents across the world’s cities. Growth rate increases were largest in Asian cities. This shift toward vertical development has profound consequences for material and energy use, local climate and urban living.

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