Scaling of the Environmental Impacts of Transport and Urban Patterns (SCALE-IT-UP)

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Jan 2018
Duration in months:

32
Funding:

FNR – Luxembourg
Principal Investigator(s):

Geoffrey CARUSO

About

Human activities are major contributors to global warming and pollution. Cities are growing and concentrate a large portion of these emitting activities, especially through the transport and housing sectors. There is debate on what is the optimal size and density of cities to support economic and social activities in an environmental friendly manner. An increasing opinion is that the larger and the denser are cities, the more environmentally friendly they are. This conclusion is confronted with two difficulties. First, there is a lack of comparable definitions of the spatial extent of cities, which is necessary for ranking many cities and their environmental impacts along population size or density. Second, describing a city as large or dense overlooks its internal structure, especially the distribution of densities as one goes away form the main centers and the relative location of uses. This project will analyze the internal urban structure of 800 European cities, after applying a comparable definition based on land use scaling properties. It will then investigate the scaling with population of internal characteristics of the urban structure and measured environmental impacts.