3.5 — Soil sealing
What are the drivers for soil sealing?
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How our lifestyles drive land take and soil sealing
Over recent decades, growing wealth and changing lifestyles have increased the demand for built-up land. This has contributed strongly to today’s high standard of living in many European countries – but it has also intensified land take and soil sealing.
Think about our modern lifestyle and welfare-based society, but also your everyday life: where you live, how you get around, where you shop, do sports, study, where the energy that charges your phone comes from. All of these activities need space. Housing, roads, industrial areas, parking lots, and infrastructure all require land – and once land is built on, the soil underneath is often sealed.
On average, each person today uses more land than in the past (Scalenghe & Marsan, 2009); the land use intensity has increased. Homes are larger, cities spread outward, and infrastructure networks expand. This shift has led to increasing urban sprawl.
Land use intensity
Land-use intensity refers to amount of built-up (artificial) land there is per person.
- Low land-use intensity means a high amount of built-up land per person and is typical of dispersed settlements, high number of second homes, and tourist areas.
- High land-use intensity means small amount of built-up land per person and is typical of compact, densely populated cities.
Urban sprawl
Urban sprawl describes the expanding of cities into surrounding areas in a low-density and often poorly coordinated way. It is typically characterized by scattered housing and patchy development rather than compact city growth.