A Long-Term Archaeological Reappraisal of Low-Density Urbanism: Implications for Contemporary Cities

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Abstract

Dispersed, low-density urbanism has conventionally been considered as a unique consequence of industrialization and factors such as mechanized transport. Pre-industrial urbanism by contrast, has been perceived almost entirely in terms of compact densely inhabited cities with a strong differentiation between an urban and a rural populace. Evidence demonstrates, low-density settlements were a notable feature of the agrarian-urban world, especially in the tropics, and have been a characteristic of every known socio-economic system used by Homo sapiens. This paper situates past examples of large, low-density, dispersed urban settlements, with their long histories and their distinct patterns of growth and demise, in relation to contemporary low-density cities. This critical reappraisal of low-density, dispersed cities in the context of a long and culturally diverse urban past is significant for addressing urban sustainability challenges.

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Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools.

Karen Seto, Burak Güneralp, Lucy Hutyra (2012)

Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass. If current trends in population density continue and all areas with high probabilities of urban expansion undergo change, then by 2030, urban land cover will increase by 1.2 million km(2), nearly tripling the global urban land area circa 2000. This increase would result in considerable loss of habitats in key biodiversity hotspots, with the highest rates of forecasted urban growth to take place in regions that were relatively undisturbed by urban development in 2000: the Eastern Afromontane, the Guinean Forests of West Africa, and the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka hotspots. Within the pan-tropics, loss in vegetation biomass from areas with high probability of urban expansion is estimated to be 1.38 PgC (0.05 PgC yr(-1)), equal to ∼5% of emissions from tropical deforestation and land-use change. Although urbanization is often considered a local issue, the aggregate global impacts of projected urban expansion will require significant policy changes to affect future growth trajectories to minimize global biodiversity and vegetation carbon losses.

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Urbanization in developing countries: Current trends, future projections, and key challenges for sustainability

Barney Cohen (2006)

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Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands

Christopher Bren d’Amour, Femke Reitsma, Giovanni Baiocchi … (2017)

Urbanization’s contribution to land use change emerges as an important sustainability concern. Here, we demonstrate that projected urban area expansion will take place on some of the world’s most productive croplands, in particular in megaurban regions in Asia and Africa. This dynamic adds pressure to potentially strained future food systems and threatens livelihoods in vulnerable regions. Urban expansion often occurs on croplands. However, there is little scientific understanding of how global patterns of future urban expansion will affect the world’s cultivated areas. Here, we combine spatially explicit projections of urban expansion with datasets on global croplands and crop yields. Our results show that urban expansion will result in a 1.8–2.4% loss of global croplands by 2030, with substantial regional disparities. About 80% of global cropland loss from urban expansion will take place in Asia and Africa. In both Asia and Africa, much of the cropland that will be lost is more than twice as productive as national averages. Asia will experience the highest absolute loss in cropland, whereas African countries will experience the highest percentage loss of cropland. Globally, the croplands that are likely to be lost were responsible for 3–4% of worldwide crop production in 2000. Urban expansion is expected to take place on cropland that is 1.77 times more productive than the global average. The loss of cropland is likely to be accompanied by other sustainability risks and threatens livelihoods, with diverging characteristics for different megaurban regions. Governance of urban area expansion thus emerges as a key area for securing livelihoods in the agrarian economies of the Global South.