Under the radar? ‘Soft’ residential densification in England, 2001–2011
Peter Bibby,
John Henneberry and
Jean-Marie Halleux
Environment and Planning B, 2020, vol. 47, issue 1, 102-118
Abstract:
Urban compaction policies have been widely adopted in developed countries in pursuit of more sustainable cities. Compactness is achieved through a process of ‘densification’, of developing and using land and buildings more intensively. However, empirical evidence on the processes and outcomes of urban densification is lacking. The paper addresses this lacuna. It considers densification in England, a country that has long experience of applying policies of urban containment and consolidation; and one where new data sources allow the analysis of recent land use change at a level of detail not hitherto possible. In England between 2001 and 2011, the bulk of additional dwellings were accommodated within urban areas, increasing their density. Yet, there were wide inter- and intra-regional variations in the pattern of densification: for example, in the contributions of large scale, formal development and of small scale, informal, gradual change – of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ densification – to the process. The significant differences in local experiences of densification that result raise major issues for policy.
Keywords: Urban containment; urban densification; hard densification; soft densification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399808318772842 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirb:v:47:y:2020:i:1:p:102-118
DOI: 10.1177/2399808318772842
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Environment and Planning B
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().