Keywords

6.1 Introduction

The main message of the ESPON SUPER project, which informed an important part of this book, is that policy makes a difference for urbanization, implying that policymakers are partly responsible for steering this in more sustainable directions (Cotella et al., 2020; Evers et al., 2020). In other words, the way that urbanization is taking shape in Europe, described at length in Chapter 2, is partly determined by the many public-sector interventions as described in Chapter 3. Inaction, sometimes in combination with claims of powerlessness in the face of exogenous or institutional constraints, can therefore also be considered a political choice. Chapter 4 illustrated the effects of alternative courses of action by way of scenarios that offered three plausible storylines towards divergent modes of urbanization (compact, polycentric and diffuse). As such, they can be deployed to facilitate public debate on long-term trends and raise support for short-term measures promoting sustainable urban development. Still, sustainability in the broadest sense cannot deliver the (technocratic) win/win so coveted by politicians; hard choices need to be made that require sustained commitment, risk-taking, and conciliatory measures to mitigate clashes between interests. In its analysis of the sustainability of urban form, Chapter 5 revealed inherent trade-offs within sustainability as well as providing an account of how governments wrestle with these dilemmas in practice when introducing interventions to make development practices more sustainable.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring together the different threads of this book outlined above and formulate synthetic conclusions and recommendations. We do this with two different types of readers in mind. The first are policymakers, officials, and other socially engaged individuals who wish to be agents of change towards a more sustainable Europe (Sect. 6.2). The second types of readers are scholars, students, and researchers (Sect. 6.3) interested in gaining or exchanging knowledge about sustainable urbanization.

For the first type of reader, Sect. 6.2 supplies conclusions and recommendations that fit the current policy context in Europe in all its complexity. Despite a consensus on the goal of sustainable urbanization, there is substantial disagreement about what this entails and the means to achieve it. Between the unlikely extremes of no-regret and certain-regret lie hard choices that demand local policy attention. The conclusions and recommendations are therefore rooted in a view of urbanization as a wickedly complex place-based activity fraught with dilemmas, where few technically correct solutions exist—only better or worse decisions.

Section 6.3 positions this work in the broader scholarly debate and identifies future directions of inquiry for researchers. First, it recounts our conceptual contribution to the urban sprawl/sustainable urbanization discussion, notably the choice for a less normative/pejorative terminology. This is supplemented by recalling the methodological innovations such as morphological analysis and the sustainability assessment methodologies. Second, we argue that the pan-European approach presented here can and should be followed up by more detailed analyses and testing of hypotheses.

6.2 Implications for Policy and Practice

The edited volume The Future of Sustainable Cities (Flint, 2012) was written at a time when the hegemony of neoliberal logic was being questioned: the 2008 financial crisis had demonstrated that the global marketplace could not deliver the promised win-wins of sustainable development and, moreover, was itself acutely unstable. The further retrenchment of welfare states and draconian austerity measures to jumpstart the economy further dispelled the illusion that a harmonious balance between the three dimensions of sustainability was attainable. With remarkable prescience, the book asked how to move the agenda forward in “a new epoch in which … crisis is becoming a way of life” (Flint, 2012, p. 3). Ten years on, Europe is dealing with the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis and grappling with the climate and looming biodiversity crises. This has been given additional urgency by the war in Ukraine and related humanitarian, energy, food, and immigration crises. At the same time, we see a rise in nationalism and populism. One could surmise that crisis-oriented thinking is unconducive to the sustainable urbanization agenda, which is inherently long-term and often not perceived as urgent. Just as convincingly, one could also argue that sustainable urbanization is needed now more than ever. Unsurprisingly, we take the second view.

The decisions we make about urban development and land use today will impact our physical environment for decades or even centuries to come. And given that land-use conversion is socially determined—it is, after all, the outcome of conscious decisions made by human beings—it is also something that can be affected by conscious human interventions. Policies and practices matter. As the SUPER project argued, now is the time to act (Evers et al., 2020, p. 1).

Looking forward, we note that the playing field has changed considerably. Urbanization was for decades, if not centuries, the exclusive domain of the local and regional level, with the national level playing a more distant, coordinating role and defining the powers, mechanisms, and instruments of the planning system. However, the European Union is becoming a major factor to be reckoned with. The EU is increasingly implementing policies that, if not in name, at least in substance, promote sustainable urbanization (as well as policies which run counter to it). The ‘no net land take in 2050’ target, nature restoration standards, the Urban Agenda, and the European Green Deal taxonomy are noteworthy examples of policies that will impact planning decisions on urban development. Europeanization is visible in the ambition to enhance harmonization and standardization of targets and goals, which can run a risk of oversimplification and the belief that ‘best practices’ can be readily transferred from one territorial context to the other. Reality has shown itself to be more complex: the cumulative effect of EU policies on urbanization is not necessarily coherent or necessarily sustainable. At the same time, sustainable urbanization interventions take on different guises in different national contexts, producing different effects. For this reason, one should be cautious when formulating pan-European conclusions and recommendations.

This was also the position taken in the SUPER project. It formulated rather cautious messages for planners and policymakers. Three will be elaborated in light of recent policy developments with references to chapters of this book.

  • Learn from the past and the future.

  • Learn from other contexts.

  • Take a long-term holistic approach.

6.2.1 Learn from the Past and the Future

The evolution of European land use occurs gradually and incrementally. In the 2000–2018 period, only 0.6% of the surface area under investigation changed its function. Much of this regarded an exchange between agricultural and natural land or shifts within use categories. Urbanization, which accounted for almost half of this land-use change, is significant because it is so unidirectional: over eight times of land is converted to urban use than back. This aspect of irreversibility justifies policy attention.

A major finding of the analysis of land-use developments in the 2000–2018 period (Chapter 2) was that the distribution of developments is highly heterogeneous and that the myriad indicators produced vastly different results. This makes it very difficult to make blanket claims about sustainability at the pan-European level. For example, we see strong urban growth in some parts of Europe, slower development in others and even deurbanization in some instances. This is only partly related to demographic and economic developments. We see sharp rises in infrastructural land use in some areas (also per capita), whereas similar types of regions remain stable. We see some monocentric cities expanding by contiguous or clustered development while others display profound diffusion. Furthermore, the sustainability of these developments is anything but clear-cut. Urban development often entails a trade-off between different sustainability dimensions. For example, more urban fabric per capita suggests more living space and affordability (social sustainability) but lower land consumption efficiency (environmental sustainability).

Despite this, some general correlations cannot be denied. Urbanization can be partly explained by drivers such as population and socio-economic development, particularly the 2008 crisis (Berisha et al., 2023b). Given this, the multiple crises of today could affect location preferences in the future, shifting urbanization pressure to different types of locations. How is still largely a matter of debate. This underpins the importance of making and using policy scenarios such as those drawn up in the SUPER project for 2050 to explore the advantages and disadvantages of alternative developmental trajectories as a basis for political discussion and strategy formulation.

6.2.2 Learn from Other Contexts

Factors such as demographic and economic development never sufficiently explain urbanization—the relationship is weak at best. The SUPER project compiled over 200 examples of public-sector interventions that affected urbanization in Europe into a database. The examples vary in terms of goals, scales, instruments, and success. This evidence base strongly suggests that institutional and policy factors can adjust the payoffs or orientation of stakeholders involved in the development process through a combination of carrots, sticks, and sermons. Given there is no possibility for a rigorous causal analysis (there is no control group to tell us what would have happened otherwise), the case studies revealed that the interviewed stakeholders widely believed that interventions do impact development practices. This should encourage policymakers that sustainability can be promoted.

There is however no failsafe intervention: little regularity was found in terms of what works and why—interventions fail in some regions and succeed in others. The analysis moreover suggests that it is difficult to be successful in all aspects of sustainability simultaneously; sustainability includes divergent forces and mechanisms that are hard to reconcile. Synergies are present, but territorially differentiated: several case studies demonstrated how, for instance, the conservation of a particular open area (environmental sustainability) offered an opportunity for public uses (social sustainability) and profit (economic sustainability). For this reason, the intervention database should be used to inspire policymakers about what is possible, rather than suggesting a particular course of action. This was the approach taken in the SUPER spinoffs, where the researchers worked together with policymakers to first put their urbanization objectives into a European perspective and then described relevant interventions in other countries (Berisha et al., 2023a).

6.2.3 Take a Long-Term Holistic Approach

The case studies revealed widespread agreement that urbanization practices had become unsustainable, which provides a mandate for action. This does not imply that change will be immediate. It can take years, if not decades, to implement reforms towards sustainable urbanization and even longer to feel their effects. For this reason, it is important to consider other long-term trends and developments such as demography and climate change when drawing up strategies. This requires leadership in crafting long-term holistic strategies or visions to embed operational interventions and it requires courage to defend these values against pressing short-term issues.

The case studies underlined the value of making a clear, inclusive, and comprehensive spatial strategy. Many interviewed stakeholders speculated that if their intervention had been supported by a strategy, it would have been easier to implement. In this, a higher level of scale is often needed to transcend parochial interests and strike a balance between the three dimensions of sustainability; unidimensional interventions at the local level were comparably less successful. This finding lends credence to the claim that “Planning as an academic discipline and as an applied field has a great deal to contribute to the envisioning of, and working toward, creating more sustainable human settlements: more sustainable towns, counties, metropolitan areas, or multijurisdictional regions-or what I call collectively sustainable communities” (Beatley, 1995). Given the multiple crises Europe is facing, this should be interpreted as a call to action for spatial planners.

6.3 Implications for the Academic Debate

6.3.1 Conceptualization of Sustainable Urbanization

Our decision to emphatically reject normative terminology (i.e. sprawl, land take) in favour of neutral terminology (i.e. urban form, urbanization) could be criticized for downplaying the need to thoroughly rethink current land development practices and reform institutions. We do not accept this argument for two reasons. First, a normative tone in research carries the risk of becoming pigeonholed, and subsequently dismissed, as activist science. This would be unfortunate, as much ESPON-funded work, including the SUPER project, is oriented towards providing overviews of relevant information to ground policy decisions as an ‘honest broker’ (Pielke, 2007). Second, there is conceptual confusion about both land take as well as urban sprawl. Referring to the phenomenon as urbanization, urban development, and urban form is preferable.

This last point has become increasingly urgent given the nascent legislation on land take. This term is first and foremost problematic due to its inherent pejorative connotations: it is easily confused with illegal appropriation or settlement, tactical acquisition (land grab), compulsory purchases, or downzoning (takings). Instead, it refers to a shift from one type of land use to another. Chapter 2 explained the drawbacks of using Corine Land Cover data to calculate land take, due to problematic classifications and insufficient resolution. Moreover, land take as it is used in the Soil Monitoring Law proposal (European Commission, 2023) is conceptually muddled. Its point of departure is binary: a given land-use change is land take if it concerns the transformation from natural or semi-natural land to ‘artificial’ (usually urban) land, implying it can be measured in surface area (e.g. hectares). However, the proposal also links artificialization to the reduced ability of the land to deliver ecosystem services, which implies a sliding scale. Academics should not uncritically adopt policy concepts in vogue but instead actively interrogate their implications and, if needed, offer alternatives (Decoville, 2018).

For a similar reason we decided to employ the common three-dimensional interpretation of sustainability used in policy, rather than taking a deep-ecology or degrowth approach. We are aware that this approach can obfuscate conflict and of its blatant (mis)use in politics to suggest the existence of a technically optimal solution, something which could ultimately undermine the creation of a truly sustainable agenda (Whitehead, 2012). We try to retain a critical distance by employing the three dimensions not to reconcile, but to investigate the (in)compatibility of the three dimensions. We furthermore argue that a multidimensional approach is more amenable to spatial planning, which strives to balance competing land-use claims. As spatial planners are crucial actors in redirecting urbanization in Europe, it makes sense to use terminology that aligns with their ontology and activity; the notion of land take falls short on this notion as well (Evers, 2024). Moreover, if one rejects the utopia of optimal technocratic solutions (Campbell, 2016), the three-dimensional conceptualization of sustainability provides an adequate framework for discussing alternatives and their potential impacts.

6.3.2 Research on Land-Use Developments

The work carried out in the ESPON SUPER project and reported in this book can be seen as preliminary work towards understanding the urbanization of Europe. Our analyses have just scratched the surface of the technical potentials of the enhanced data availability. To this end, the SUPER statistical database could be enhanced. The addition of more environmental indicators, for example, would allow for more sophisticated analyses of European regions than was feasible within the SUPER project. Additional sources that could be incorporated include the Regional Human Development Index (Hardeman & Dijkstra, 2014), Ecosystem Wellbeing Index (Shaker, 2015), public service levels (Kompil et al., 2019), Quality of Life Index (ESPON, 2021), and (if available) their underlying data. At the same time, we must remain vigilant about the limitations of the land-use data, particularly for small-scale urban development. More in-depth research is needed to account for the bias of the low resolution of Corine and whether there is a practical workaround. A comparison with data sources such as the high-resolution 2019 World Settlement Footprint and the WSF Evolution (ESA, 2022) might be useful in this regard.

The preliminary statistical analysis of the sustainability of urban form at the NUTS 3 level was largely inconclusive except for the most extreme form of diffuse development. A more thorough investigation using multiple regressions on individual sustainability indicators rather than the composite index value could uncover more significant relationships. As stated in Chapter 2, the results of the manual morphological analysis could also be compared to automated methods (e.g. based on entropy or centricity). Finally, it would be interesting to see how a shift to grid cells rather than NUTS 3 areas changes the results.

The SUPER project demonstrated that the LUISETTA model could be used to create divergent urbanization scenarios. However, many problems were also encountered in this application. For example, the changes made to the input module determining the demand for urban land use were not well reflected in the output. This makes it more difficult to simulate increased densities, which is an important parameter in the discussion. Moreover, in its current form, it lacks information about policies at the (sub)national level and cannot simulate large-scale urban development.

6.3.3 On Interventions and Practices

The SUPER project provided evidence that policy and interventions matter (see Sect. 6.2.2), but more research efforts are needed to substantiate this claim. The SUPER intervention database is an excellent starting point, but it can and should be expanded. Existing information based on survey data and best judgment should be supplemented with academic research if available. Particularly the assessment of success and sustainability requires attention. Seen in this way, many entries in the intervention database could serve as a basis (or as a hypothesis) for more in-depth comparative research. In addition, due to data constraints, some topics such as fiscal policies and the interface between property rights and spatial planning were insufficiently addressed. It would be helpful to combine the insights regarding the sustainability of interventions with this more institutional strand of inquiry.

Applied policy research should not seek to impact by promoting ‘best practices’ to be replicated in other contexts, but by inspiring decision-makers to think outside their box of local practices (Shami, 2003, p. 80). It also provides them with a narrative of what could work. This was also the approach taken by two ESPON SUPER spin-off activities which applied insights to the project to support policymaking in Lithuania and Croatia (Berisha et al., 2023a).

6.4 A Final Note to Planning Practitioners and Scholars

First, we would like to make a case for the concept of sustainability. It is easy to become cynical about sustainable urbanization. Since its inception, the notion of sustainable development has been continually reinterpreted, and sometimes willingly distorted and manipulated, to the point that it often rings hollow. Recalling Wildavsky’s (1973) famous statement about planning, if sustainability is everything, maybe it’s nothing. Stretching its definition to fit new contexts and applications can undermine its integrity and its force as an agent of much-needed change. In fact, it can arguably become an agent of, or at least complicit to, greenwashing. Nevertheless, we would like to advance that precisely these two attributes of sustainability—its flexibility and breadth—are very useful for those in the planning profession.

  • Flexibility: planners are acutely aware that the level at which a planning issue manifests itself as a problem is not necessarily that at which planning instruments are set—there is always a need for local interpretation and ad hoc rescaling. Ideally, sustainability should not be understood as an absolute measure but as a highly context-dependent orientation. A glocalized orientation can act as a bridge.

  • Breadth: planners, especially in systems adhering to the comprehensive integrated approach, are keenly aware that their activity entails a balancing act between competing interests. Broad sustainability helps to search for win/win solutions while making trade-offs explicit. In negotiation theory, complexity is advantageous because it increases the chances of shifting zero-sum distributive bargaining into integrative joint problem-solving (Susskind & Cruikshank, 1987).

Second, we would like to call for more attention to urbanization processes because this is potentially where planners can make the most difference; the tools planners wield are primarily linked to regulating land use, especially urban development. However, current planning scholarship has other things on its mind, much of it related to social justice. It is telling that at major European planning conferences such as AESOP, there is rarely a separate track on urbanization or land-use planning (only a single track on law at the 2023 congress mentions planning instruments). Given that spatial strategies, zoning plans and planning permission continue to comprise the bulk of what planners do on an everyday basis, this may signal a rift between academia and practice.

The much-maligned concept of sustainability can perhaps help pull these disparate worlds together. Bearing in mind its relevance for planning with respect to flexibility and breadth as argued above, sustainability can also be viewed as a form of justice. Its temporal interpretation demands that future generations be given a say in present decision-making and its thematic interpretation does the same for ecological and social aspects (under the assumption that economic interests represent themselves sufficiently). So sustainable urbanization is something that could unite those in and around the planning profession. As we rapidly urbanize the planet, this is not a trivial consideration.