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The city they are unpredictable places. Not only because of the hustle and bustle of the streets, but also considering their evolution over time. Let’s take for example Leipzig: It was once the fifth largest city in Germany, but since German reunification in 1990 it has been subject to strong deurbanisation. THE residents left the city en masse, moving to new settlements outside the urban boundaries. In 2000, one in five homes inside the city was empty. But then everything changed. With the advent of the new millennium the German economy started to recover and jobs returned to central Leipzig. Once empty properties have been demolished to make way for new housing developments. As the new immigrants chose to live closer to the heart of the city, Leipzig’s suburbs began to shrink again. Today it is one of the fastest growing cities in Germany, with its population increasing by around 2 percent a year.
As emblematic as it is, Leipzig’s transformation is just one example of a urban renaissance ongoing across the continent. After decades of slowly moving outward, with the creation of new suburban commuter belts, the European cities are becoming more densely populated againa phenomenon that potentially entails benefits both for the environment that for our well-being. Between 1970 and 2010 most cities went through a phase that urban planners define as “de-densification“. As societies became more affluent and increasingly reliant on cars (and citizens reached middle age), the attractiveness of low-density housing developments on the outskirts of cities increased, offering larger homes to those who wanted more space while still guaranteeing a limited distance from offices and shops. L’suburban expansion it was the predominant trend in most cities around the world in the second half of the 20th century, explains Chiara Cortinovis, an urban planning researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Trend reversed
When has plotted the evolution of density of 331 European cities between 2006 and 2018, Cortinovis actually found an expansion of suburban areas for the first half of the period studied. 60 percent of the surveyed cities lost density between 2006 and 2012. In the following six years, however, this dynamic suddenly reversed. Between 2012 and 2018, only a third of the cities in the sample experienced a steady reduction in density. Almost all of these urban centers are located in Eastern Europe or the Iberian Peninsula, where the population of cities is shrinking while the suburbs continue to expand. However, the picture across most of Central, Northern and Western Europe shows that cities are becoming more densely populated. Even as the population continues to grow, most people aren’t moving into suburban homes, but in urban centres.
The net results that emerged from the research surprised Cortinovis. While the population was steadily increasing, cities’ urban carbon footprint was not increasing sensitively. The phenomenon does not only affect cities that, like Leipzig, had been the subject of an exodus of residents in the previous decades. “It also happens in cities with a long-term growth trend – observes the researcher -. It means that these cities have a decent capacity to absorb newcomers“. If cities are becoming denser, newcomers have to spread out over land that is already developed. This is most likely due to a combination of vacant housing filling up again, more people living in shared flats and land already existing within the urban centers that are being adapted to accommodate more crowded homes.And while the cities were involved in a process of densification, development of natural or agricultural land on the outskirts of cities slowed dramatically.
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