Europe shifts to more densely populated cities

Expanding cities pose multiple dangers: they threaten biodiversity, lead to the loss of farmland and contribute to climate change. However, in cities with a high population density – many people living in a specific area – less space is needed to accommodate the population. This means land that would otherwise be used for housing can now be saved for other uses.

Despite evidence that densification could make cities more sustainable, population density dropped in most urban areas around the world between 1970 and 2010. In fact, European cities – amongst the least dense worldwide – “were in the forefront of this de-densification trend,” according to a post on Springer Nature’s ‘Sustainability Community’.

However, in recent decades, Europe’s cities seem to have adopted a variety of pathways towards urban development. To gain a clearer picture, researchers supported by the EU-funded CONNECTING Nature and CLEARING HOUSE projects investigated the population density trends of around 330 European cities between 2006 and 2018, and their underlying trends in residential area and population.

“We hypothesized that different types of population change could have different impacts on urban development,” writes Dr Chiara Cortinovis of CONNECTING Nature and CLEARING HOUSE projects’ partner Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, in the post. “Hence, we broke down the total change into natural change, i.e. the difference between births and deaths, and net migration, i.e. the difference between immigrants and emigrants,” continues Dr Cortinovis, who is also the first author of the study published in the journal ‘npj Urban Sustainability’.The results showed a shift in the trend from de-densification between 2006 and 2012 (confirming earlier findings) to densification between 2012 and 2018. In the first period, the trend towards lower density “prevailed everywhere except in northern cities, but it was particularly intense in the eastern countries and in southern Italy and Spain,” notes Dr Cortinovis. In the second period, around 25 % of the cities moved towards densification, most notably in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. “De-densification continued to prevail only in the most peripheral areas of Europe, both in the Iberian Peninsula to the West and in the former socialist countries to the East,” the researcher states.

The two main drivers of the shift towards densification were a more distributed population growth and a slowdown of land take for residential use following the 2008 global financial crisis. “A clear acceleration in net migration rates, with immigration pushing population growth, occurred in most cities turning from de-densification to densification,” the study reports.

However, as noted in the post, the drivers of this densification may not be easy to sustain in the long term: “The pandemic has already weakened the attractiveness of city cores, while policies to counteract the effects of economic crises often favor new construction activities. Moreover, if achieved at the expense of green areas and in an imbalanced way, densification could undermine both social cohesion and quality of life.”

CONNECTING Nature (COproductioN with NaturE for City Transitioning, INnovation and Governance) aimed to advance Europe as a global leader in the innovation and implementation of nature-based solutions. CLEARING HOUSE (CLEARING HOUSE - Collaborative Learning in Research, Information-sharing and Governance on How Urban tree-based solutions support Sino-European urban futures) is developing tools to aid in the design, governance and management of urban forests.

For more information, please see:

CONNECTING Nature project website

CLEARING HOUSE project website