Assessing expanding space use versus infill for economic activities.

Abstract

In order to limit additional (net) land take for economic activities, the reality of space use needs to be properly understood since the location of economic activities and the patterns of space use vary in different environments. This was assessed by comparing the spatial patterns obtained from a field inventory with those from existing data for 5 case areas in Flanders (Belgium). Each case area is a transect from a high density urban area to a suburban neighbourhood or even a semi-rural zone, in different (types of) regions: inland-coastline transect, transects in the metropolitan areas of the major cities Antwerp and Ghent (exluding the city centres), in the medium sized city of Hasselt (and its suburbs) and th smaller city of Aalst (and the zone along an important access road), and transects incorporating small towns such as Deinze and Veurne . The observations in the field were made from what is visible from the street, thus representing what is normally perceived as economic activity. The statistics are based on official data, mostly derived from tax returns and social security contributions, and on commercial retail data. The location of economic activities and the patterns of space use vary in different settlement environments. The analysis then compared similar settlement environments in different regions, and identified typical characteristics for 8 location environments (with some further subcategories). These were presented to experts in workshops and (group) interviews. This revealed that, in some environments, (the combination of) data and statistics give a good understanding of the space use while, in other environments, gaps with realities in the field are obvious. Therefore, suggestions are made for targeted new data collection methods, such as remote sensing, crowd sourcing, and web data extraction.