Global inequality in built-up land per capita and its change trajectories between 1985 and 2020

Abstract

Built-up land has increased rapidly in recent decades, thus aggravating the competition for land between multiple uses. The increase in urban land can be decomposed into changes in population and changes in built-up land per person. Yet, it is unclear how this decomposition differs by country and how this decomposition changes over time. Moreover, we don’t know whether these changes affect the inequality in built-up land per capita. Here, we analyze the global distribution of built-up land per capita in the year 2020, as well as the changes therein between 1985 and 2020. We find that built-up land per capita in 2020 differs by an order of magnitude between countries, ranging from 15 m² per person in Ethiopia to 734 m² per person in Australia. Moreover, we find a wide range of different change trajectories, including both increases and decreases in built-up land per capita and in total population. As the total area of urban land increased in all countries, decreases in urban land consumption reflect a situation where the population increases faster than the total amount of urban land. We also find a large inequality in urban land consumption across countries, as indicated by a Gini index of 0.47 in 1985, decreasing only slightly to 0.45 in 2020. These findings suggest the need for a regionally differentiated approach to reduce urban land take, focusing first on mitigating further increases in those countries that already have a high urban land consumption.

Keywords

Urban expansion / Human settlements / Inequality / Urban densification / SDG 11 / Sustainable development

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jasper van Vliet: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Hang Yang: Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Data curation. Vita Bakker: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. Mengmeng Li: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

JvV and VB were supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO in the form of a VIDI grant (Grant No. VI.Vidi.198.008). In addition, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.07.001.

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