The battle for urban land

What or who wins the battle for urban land? As we are facing as rapid urbanization and a population increase of 3 milliard people by the year 2050 the question of who and what wins the battle for urban land is becoming more and more relevant. In order to provide homes and vital services cities needs to become denser and urban sprawl needs to be reduced. The governance required to succeed, calls foran integrative approach to urban matters.

Over seventy urban planners and researchers from around Europe spent two days in Gothenburg, Sweden at the Urban Nexus Dialouge Café trying to tackle this challenge. Frédéric Saliez from UN-Habitat pointed out it is all about working towards the right density. Residents in cities should have access to various kinds of urban qualities. Typically, such access is not fairly distributed. Instead, the distribution of land use can be understood as a contest between various interests. On the positive side there is a lot of potential to meet this challenge as Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm Resilince Center highlighted, sixty percent of urban land is yet to be built by 2030.

The delegates discussed the theme of the Dialogue Café - Competing for Urban Land from three different perspectives; Building mass and physical structure, Sociocultural space and Green-blue infrastructure. Several workshops were held as well as field trips in Gothenburg, all focusing on the different themes. During the second day a web based dialogue tool was used to gather all comments from the delegates during a work-shop.

The discussions during the Dialogue café was based on a Synthesis report on urban land-use in Europe, and all comments and feedback will be incorporated into a Follow up report which will be made available on the Urban Nexus website.

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