A land-cover based urban dispersion indicator suitable for highly dispersed, discontinuously artificialized territories: The case of continental Portugal

Pablo Urbieta, Emilio Fernandez, Luís Ramos, Gonzalo Méndez Martínez and Ricardo Bento

Land Use Policy, 2019, vol. 85, issue C, 92-103

Abstract: Land-cover based indicators assessing the effect of the magnitude and spatial patterns of the artificialization process, including urban sprawl, barely consider the impact of the discontinuous spatial distribution of the artificialized built-up areas. In this study, we propose a new urban dispersion indicator, which incorporates the characteristic dynamics of the discontinuous urban artificial land cover class, characteristic of scarcely populated and highly dispersed territories, such as is the case of Continental Portugal. The indicator is based on the premise that the more built-up area, the higher the uptake of constructed area in a discontinuous pattern and the more dispersed this built-up area, the lower urban sustainability of the territory. Given that the minimum cartographic unit in Corine Land Cover (25 ha) is typically higher than most of the discontinuous urban patches in these territories, in this research we used national land use data from Portugal with a minimum cartographic unit of 1 ha.

Keywords: Artificialization patterns; Low-density; Highly-dispersed population; Dispersion indicator; Continental Portugal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:85:y:2019:i:c:p:92-103

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.03.048

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