Re-urbanizing the European City: A Multivariate Analysis of Population Dynamics During Expansion and Recession Times.

After a long phase of suburbanization promoting economic decentralization and uneven expansion of urban rings, re-urbanization has been observed in an increasing number of European cities. However, a comprehensive analysis of demographic dynamics underlying spatial patterns-and factors-of re-urbanization is still lacking for the European continent. This study contributes to fill this knowledge gap by proposing a comparative analysis of population dynamics at two spatial scales ('inner cities' and 'large urban zones') in 129 European metropolitan regions under economic expansion (2000-2007) and recession (2008-2014). Non-parametric correlations, principal component analysis, and stepwise multiple regressions were used to identify different spatial patterns of population growth at continental and regional scale in Europe. The number of cities studied that showed a trend towards re-urbanization increased from 36 in 2000-2007 to 47% in 2008-2014. Positive rates of population growth in inner cities were found to be associated with high levels of disposable per capita income at the metropolitan scale. During recession, spatial differences in population growth rates were suggestive of a moderate rearrangement towards re-urbanization in northern and central Europe and less polarized metropolitan regions, with declining population in inner cities of southern and eastern Europe. Based on peculiar demographic dynamics found in the study area, the analysis performed brings useful insights to the debate about the future development of European cities.

Paths to Change: Bio-Economic Factors, Geographical Gradients and the Land-Use Structure of Italy.

This study introduces a bio-economic approach to evaluate the influence of local socioeconomic contexts on complex processes of landscape transformation (urbanization, withdrawal of farming with woodland creation and loss in crop mosaics) in a sustainable development perspective. Land-use and socioeconomic indicators (including shares of agriculture, industry and services in total product, per-worker value added, productivity by economic sector, distance from central cities, latitude and elevation) at the local district scale in Italy have been considered together in an exploratory approach based on multivariate statistics. The combined use of land-use and socioeconomic indicators was preferred to more traditional approaches based on single-variable analysis and allows identifying latent factors of landscape transformation at the local scale. Our approach sheds light in the intimate relationship between regional economic structures and land-use change in districts with varying socio-environmental attributes across Italy. Urban-rural divides, coastal-inland dichotomy and the elevation gradient were relevant factors shaping urbanization-driven landscape transformations at the country scale. Indicators of economic structure (and especially industrial production and per-worker productivity of industry and services) were also documented to influence greatly entity and direction of change in the use of land. Discontinuous and dispersed urbanization has been demonstrated to be spatially-decoupled from consolidated (continuous and compact) urbanization, expanding into undeveloped rural areas progressively far away from central cities and being spatially associated with forest land.