URBS PANDENS is funded by the European Commission (Contract No. EVK-CT-2001-0052) and carried out by a consortium of nine partners in seven European countries.
Involved Case Studies
The urban areas selected are:
The case studies will be performed by experienced urban study groups within the case study regions.
- Liverpool (UK),
- Stockholm (S),
- Leipzig (D),
- Vienna (A),
- Athens (HE),
- Warsaw (PL) and
- Ljubljana (SI).
Two major issues will be investigated:
* Historical trends of the most relevant aspects contributing to the observed dynamical development in the overall field. This is analogous to conventional data collection and will be needed to test various hypotheses on mechanisms and types of interactions. This has to address questions such as: Is the concept of stages of urban development in the sense of urbanisation - suburbanisation - counterurbanisation - re-urbanisation applicable and if yes what stage has currently been achieved? What peculiarities have been observed within these general lines of development? What environmental effects of sprawl have been observed? What was the temporal signal of ecosystem loss? Etc.
* Hypotheses about aspects or the whole of the regionally specific mechanisms governing urban sprawl. In our context we have to address questions like: Does residential suburbanisation happen due to environmental pollution or is social segregation the dominating driver? What are the different economic cost factors causing the development of industrial parks outside the traditional urban centre? How effective is urban planning in the region and due to what reasons? What was the effect of implementing EU regulations, like the European Spatial Development Plan? Etc. These questions focus on mechanisms rather than on observations alone.Figure 1 describes the general scheme of the case study integration within the project (click on the map for a bigger display).
