An Analysis of the Spatial Development of European Cities Based on Their Geometry and the CORINE Land Cover (CLC) Database

The study demonstrated that the rate of spatial development is correlated with its fractal dimension. The presented results indicate that the fractal dimension can be a useful tool for describing different phases of urban development. Therefore, the formulated research hypothesis states that the fractal dimension of cities’ external boundaries is correlated with the rate of spatial development in urban areas. The above implies that the higher the rate of spatial development, the smoother the external boundaries of urban investment. Rapidly developing cities contribute to considerable changes in land management, in particular in municipalities surrounding the urban core. Urban development processes often induce negative changes in land management and contribute to chaotic and unplanned development. To address these problems, new methods are being developed for modeling and predicting the rate of changes in transitional zones between urban and rural areas. These processes are particularly pronounced in urban space, whose expansion proceeds at an uneven pace. The aim of this study was to propose a method for describing urbanization processes that are based on the dependence between the urban growth rate, the fractal dimension, and basic geometric parameters, such as city area and the length of city boundaries. Based on the calculated changes in the values of these parameters, a classification system was proposed to identify distinctive phases of urban development. The study revealed that land cover databases are highly useful for such analyses. The study was conducted on 58 medium-size European cities with a population of up to 300,000, including France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Croatia. The study demonstrated that the fractal dimension and the basic geometric parameters of urban boundaries are significantly correlated with the rate of the spatial development of cities. The proposed indicators can be used to describe the spatial development of urban areas and the rate of urban growth. The development of the analyzed cities was modeled with the use of CORINE Land Cover (CLC) data for 2000–2006–2012–2018, acquired under the EU Copernicus program.