Table of Contents
Urban/peri-urban development
Definition
Urban development refers to urbanization with its different dimensions and perceptions: physical (land use change such as urban sprawl and increase in artificial surfaces), geographical (population and employment concentration), economic (markets, agglomeration economies and knowledge spillovers) and societal (social and cultural change). Urbanization is a process that takes a territory to an urban state in these different dimensions, most notably through population and employment increase and linked land use change.
Concept
In this regard, processes of population and employment deconcentration that counter or even outpace these concentration processes are generally referred to as suburbanization, periurbanization, exurbanization or more generally as counterurbanization (see Mitchell,C. (2004) for a scientific discussion). The use of the terms depends, mainly, on the physical distance from the city center at which growth and linked land use change takes place. Here, periurban development is defined as non-urban population increase and sprawl of urbanized land that takes place beyond the city's or agglomeration's physical limits. Source: Cremer-Schulte, D. (PhD project)