Dashboard (Tableau)

Land use efficiency in Functional Urban Areas, 2018

Dashboard (Tableau)

Prod-ID: DAS-281-en

Published 03 Dec 2021

1 min read

Topics: Biodiversity — Ecosystems Land use Sustainability transitions

Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) represent 22.9 % of the EU territory, but host 75 % of its population. In order to fulfil global and European policy objectives, like “no net land take by 2050”, it is advisable to establish guidance values for land use efficiency for most common settlement types, in particular for urban fringes and small towns in rural areas. Such guidance values need to consider a good balance between efficient land use and sufficient green space to allow a good quality of life. This dashboard presents land use efficiency values for FUAs, calculated as land uptake per capita corresponding to the SDG indicator 11.3.1.

More information

The term land use efficiency focuses on the use of artificial areas in FUAs in proportion of inhabitants. As a measure for quantification, the amount of artificial area per capita is used. It has to be stressed that thresholds in this regard have neither been discussed nor defined yet. As of today, we can only compare land use efficiency of defined regions and observe high, low and average values. The use of artificial area per capita is also addressed in the SDG11.3.1 indicator Land consumption per capita. In this chapter land use efficiency is adjusted to the SDG11.3.1 concept and urban green areas are not considered when addressing artificial areas.

Low land use efficiency means that few people use a lot of artificial area, hence the amount of artificial area per capita is high. This is typically the case in remote rural areas, where buildings have only one or two floors and the road network is frequented by few people.

High land use efficiency means that small amounts of artificial area are used by many inhabitants. This is only possible if buildings have several floors and the built infrastructure, in particular the road network and public transport, are frequented by many persons. Very high land use efficiency can be observed in city centres of very large metropoles. A drawback of high land use efficiency is the fact that also sealing rates are high and hence unsealed surfaces and vegetation are low.

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