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Governance fragmentation and urban spatial expansion: Evidence from Europe and the United States

Governance-Fragmentierung und urbane räumliche Expansion: Erkenntnisse aus Europa und den USA

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Abstract

This study assesses the effects of urban governance structure on the spatial expansion of metropolitan areas. A more fragmented governance structure, represented by a high number of administrative units with decision power on land use per inhabitant, is expected to increase the competition between small towns in the suburbs of metropolitan areas to attract households and workers, which, in turn, induces more land uptake. We study empirically the relationship between administrative fragmentation and the spatial size of cities in a sample of 180 metropolitan areas in the contexts of the US and Europe in the period 2000—2012. Results shed light on the structural differences between the two broad regions and suggest that administrative fragmentation impacts positively on land uptake in both the United States and Europe, although to different extents.

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Notes

  1. A critical review and a discussion of the economic aspects related to land use are provided in Fischel (2015).

  2. We do not have information about alternative uses of land at the city level which could be used to account for topological limitations to urban sprawl.

  3. Data were extracted on March 2018, when the OECD provided built-up area data from different sources for the EU and the US. For the US, the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) was used in its different versions: 2001, 2006 and 2011. For Europe, the source is the CORINE Land Cover in years 2000, 2006 and 2012. For the purpose of this study, we match 2001 and 2011 US data with 2000 and 2012 EU data, respectively. It is worth noting that we estimate our models for the two regions separately. Our aim is to simplify the interpretation of results without hindering their validity. Recently, the OECD uniformed the methodologies worldwide to make data more comparable. Although they added more and smaller cities to the dataset as well as more years, they removed information on polycentricity and administrative organisation, which are pivotal to this study.

  4. The following eight countries are excluded: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta and Romania.

  5. Table 5 in the Appendix shows that the final results are robust to the choice of the threshold if allowed to vary by 100 or 200 thousand population below and above the chosen limit.

  6. GDP per capita is expressed in US dollars, at 2010 constant prices.

  7. As we mentioned previously, Table 5 in the Appendix reports robustness tests on the choice of these cutoffs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Milan, Italy

    Silvia Beghelli, Gianni Guastella & Stefano Pareglio

  2. Research Centre on Environment, Energy and Sustainable Development, Università Cattolica, Brescia, Italy

    Gianni Guastella & Stefano Pareglio

Authors
  1. Silvia Beghelli
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  2. Gianni Guastella
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  3. Stefano Pareglio
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Correspondence to Gianni Guastella.

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Appendix

Appendix

 

Table 5 Estimated effects of urban governance on urban land use in US and EU with different size thresholds
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Beghelli, S., Guastella, G. & Pareglio, S. Governance fragmentation and urban spatial expansion: Evidence from Europe and the United States. Rev Reg Res 40, 13–32 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10037-019-00136-0

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