Urban Sprawl and Air Quality in European Cities: an Empirical Assessment

Federica Cappelli, Gianni Guastella and Stefano Pareglio

No 2021.07, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Abstract: In this paper we estimate the relationship between urban sprawl and a measure of air quality, namely the number of days in which the PM10 concentration exceeds safeguard limits in European Union cities. Building on a multidimensional representation of sprawl, the paper employs several indicators to account for built-up area development, population density, and residential discontinuity. The paper employs generalised additive models to disentangle the non-linear effects in the variables and the interaction effects of the three sprawl dimensions. A significant and robust effect of urban morphology emerges after controlling for socio-economic, demographic, and climatic factors and the geographical location of the city. We find that urban sprawl impacts positively on pollutant concentration, but the effect is highly context-specific because of threshold effects and interactions.

Keywords: Air Pollution; Urban Sprawl; European Cities; Additive Models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 Q53 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-eur and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/w ... oads/NDL2021-007.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Urban Sprawl and Air Quality in European Cities: an Empirical Assessment (2021)
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:fem:femwpa:2021.07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alberto Prina Cerai ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).