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Principles for Urbanization as a Land Transition

Over the past half century, the global urban population has
Minimizing Global undergone unprecedented change, increasing from one bil-
lion to over four billion people. Major land transforma-
Land Impacts of tions have taken place to accommodate (i.e., house, educate,

Urbanization employ, serve, and facilitate) this growing urban population.

Urbanization has resulted in an expansion of urban areas
through a direct conversion of farmland, forests, deserts,
waterways, and other land systems for the development of
the built environment. Globally, the growth of the built envi-
ronment is expected to result in almost 1.5 million km2 of new
urban land between 2000 and 2030 (Seto et al. 2012), an area
roughly half the size of India. Though unprecedented in scale
and rapidity, this estimate of future urban expansion represents
only a fraction of the full extent of land changes associated
with urbanization.
Indeed, urban land expansion—where land is taken up direct-
ly for the built environment—is only one type of land change
due to urbanization. Urbanization also alters landscapes far
from cities where materials and resources are sourced in
order to construct, maintain, operate, and power our cities.
Furthermore, the layout of buildings, land use, and roads with-
in cities, or what scholars refer to as configuration of urban
land, directly affects the behaviors and consumption patterns

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of urban dwellers—our daily habits, choices, preferences, and
lifestyles—with cascading land consequences. Though these
indirect land transformations are significant, they are difficult
to directly link to their underlying cause, that is, urban devel-
opment. How urban researchers and practitioners consider,
conceptualize, and manage these different land transitions
in the design and operation of both existing and future cities
will determine whether urbanization is a crisis or opportuni-
ty for land systems and the societies they support. To guide
the design, construction, and analysis of urban areas in the
consideration of global-scale land change, we propose four
guiding principles.

Four Principles for Guiding Urban Development Toward

Sustainable Land Use

Principle One: Conceptualize Land Use Tradeoffs

“How urban researchers and
practitioners consider, conceptualize,
and manage these different land
transitions in the design and operation
of both existing and future cities will
determine whether urbanization is a
crisis or opportunity for land systems
and the societies they support.”
Eleanor C. Stokes
Yale University
Karen C. Seto
Yale University
Land is finite and urbanized land is long-lasting. Once in place,
basic urban structures and patterns are not easily reversed.
Rather, how urban land is configured will shape the social and
physical environment for decades, if not centuries, to come.
The sound design and management of urban areas today,
therefore, are of vital importance for the future. Cohesive plan-
ning must examine competing uses across local, regional, and
national scales. These competing uses include, but are not lim-
ited to: energy production, food production, materials sourc-
ing, wildlife habitat, regulation of the water system and local
climate, and protection against storms.
Urban land expansion can lead to the alteration or loss of nat-
ural landscapes and farmland that is serving important regional
and global functions. Depending on the form of development,
urban land uses can be in direct competition with many other
uses of land. For example, in coastal regions, development can
 Principles for Minimizing Global Land Impacts of Urbanization 6

w Figure 1.
Landsat image of
Cairo Egypt (gray),
surrounding the Nile
River (black) and
expanding into the
fertile agricultural
region of the Nile
delta (red). (Credit:
Karen Seto and
Meredith Reba,
from City Unseen)
TAD 3 : 1

disrupt wetlands that naturally reduce tidal flooding (Mitsch
and Gosselink 2000). In place of wetlands, new levies,
dykes, and seawalls must be constructed, at great expense,
to serve the same function. Similarly, urban expansion con-
verts vegetated land that helps to regulate the regional cli-
mate. Because concrete and asphalt absorb more heat and
have less evaporative cooling than vegetation, temperatures
around urban areas can be markedly higher, sometimes on
the order of five degrees (Peng et al. 2011). Land systems
serving global functions are also at risk of displacement
from urbanization, e.g., habitat for threatened biodiversity
or prime farmland. In Figure 1, we show a satellite image of
Cairo, Egypt, manipulated to highlight the agricultural veg-
etation in the Nile River Delta (in red) surrounding the urban
area (in gray). In Egypt, where cities have developed on the
nation’s most fertile farmland, urban expansion is expect-
ed to result in a 36% loss in national crop production by
2030 (Bren D’Amour et al. 2017). As a threat to food secu-
rity, urban expansion is a significant sustainability issue—
not only for Cairo or Alexandria—but for all of Egypt, which
will become more susceptible to international food supply
shocks as the country increasingly must depend on trade to
compensate for cropland losses.
Specific knowledge of a parcel’s land characteristics,
ecosystem services, and potential role in the global socio-
environmental system are needed to inform development
decisions. A priority for scholars and practitioners in urban
science, architecture, planning, and design is to move
beyond a binary greenfield versus brownfield delineation
to understand the sustainability tradeoffs inherent in dif-
ferent national, regional, and local development scenarios.
Cohesive planning across each of these scales could con-
nect local urban development to larger national and global
land priorities.
STOKES & SETO 7

w Figure 2.
Landsat OLI/
TIRS image of
deforestation
patterns (linear
and teal) near
the colonial town
of Paramaribo,
Suriname (center
of image). Forests
surrounding
Paramaribo are
shown in red.
(Credit: Karen Seto
and Meredith Reba,
from City Unseen)

Principle Two: Develop Awareness of the Unintended
Consequences of Urbanization in Rural and Wild Remote
Landscapes
Urban land change in one location often causes land change
in another. Urbanization alters landscapes where materials
and resources are sourced in order to construct, maintain,
and operate built environments and support urban lifestyles.
Historically, urban areas have evolved to be dependent on
their immediate surrounding areas. However, with globaliza-
tion, materials and resources are sourced through global supply
chains and extracted from distant landscapes and ecosystems,
making the impacts of urban land change more dispersed. For
example, urbanization has been a primary driver of defor-
estation in tropical forests in Latin America, Africa, and Asia
because of increased demand for lumber in urban construc-
tion (DeFries et al. 2010). In Figure 2, evidence of centuries-
old deforestation in Paramaribo, Suriname, is visible by satellite.
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Fishbone-shaped paths (teal) were cut into the forested areas
(red) to extract timber for Dutch-inspired wooden architecture.
These paths remain etched in the landscape today. Another
example of rural landscape alteration linked to urbanization can
be found in Australia and Brazil, where mining for iron deposits
necessary for steel to be used in tall buildings has resulted in
loss of hydrological functioning, loss of key pollinators, and the
decimation of many plant and animal species in sensitive eco-
systems (Cristescu et al. 2012; Smith 2015; Sonter et al. 2014).
These impacts are often linked to the proximal cause—the local
extractive industries. However, the underlying cause, urbaniza-
tion, can be difficult to attribute when it occurs far from the
places of extraction.
To consider these linked landscapes, urban resources must
be selected with origin, manufacturing, disposal, and reuse
knowledge—knowledge that, at present, is only publicly avail-
able for a small set of products and suppliers. Cradle-to-cradle
 Principles for Minimizing Global Land Impacts of Urbanization
TAD 3 : 1
r Figure 3. ASTER before (left) and after (right) images of flooding in
Minamisoma, Japan, after the Tōhoku earthquake on March 11, 2011.
The impact of floods is shown in blue and gray along the coast line. The
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is shown at the very bottom edge
of the image adjacent to protruding seawalls in the shape of a fin. (Credit:
Karen Seto and Meredith Reba, from City Unseen)
accounting for materials is needed, not just to understand
embodied energy or carbon, but also to understand the wider
social and environmental impacts of land change from the
material life cycle. Though current certification systems are an
important step in this direction, they often neglect to consid-
er local human health, livelihood, and ecosystem consequenc-
es of resource extraction and disposal in linked landscapes. To
build truly sustainable places, design decisions must fully con-
sider the activities that occur on building sites as well as the
land change associated with pre-construction and post-demo-
lition activities.
Principle Three: Recognize the Interdependent Network of Urban
Areas and Its Importance to Urban Sustainability
Along with linkages to rural landscapes, urban areas are also
interlinked to each other physically, socially, and economi-
cally. These connections are integral to the concepts of urban
8
sustainability and urban resilience, and yet are rarely consid-
ered in research or practice. For example, urban vulnerability
to climate hazards is commonly studied from the perspective of
individual cities, although systemic impacts cascading through
the urban network may be just as damaging. New research
has shown that individual cities are not only susceptible to
natural hazards, but also that they are vulnerable to hazards
that strike other cities through their supply chains (Shughrue
and Seto 2018). For example, in 2011, flooding in Bangkok,
Thailand, and surrounding areas caused massive disruptions in
the production of computer hard disks. Since Thailand’s cities
produce 25% of all hard disks on the market, computing com-
ponent prices increased by 20%, with widespread impacts on
other urban industries across the globe (Chongvilaivan 2012).
The same year, when Minamisoma, Japan, was inundated by a
tsunami on March 11, 2011, the earthquake and subsequent
flooding led to the meltdown of the Fukashima Daiichi nuclear
power plant. Due to this meltdown, household electricity prices
in other urban areas across Japan rose by an estimated 20%
(Ministry 2014). In Figure 3, satellite images show Minamisoma
before and after flooding, with the nuclear power plant shown
at the very bottom edge of the image on the coast. Cascading
impacts from climate hazards that, like Minamisoma’s tsunami,
STOKES & SETO
tend to be geographically clustered (e.g., sea level rise, hurri-
canes, extreme heat events, drought) can affect cities far from
the actual impact location.
Research and design frameworks must transition from con-
ceptualizing urban areas as individual independent places to
conceptualizing them as nodes in a global interconnected net-
work. With this reframing, both the concept of sustainability
and resiliency need to be revised. For example, the “eco-city”
concept—where an urban area is entirely self-sustaining—
becomes less valuable as a scalable sustainability model, since
the concept ignores existing complex webs of urban interde-
pendence. For resilience, strategies must be cooperative across
cities, making the entire network resilient instead of particular
urban nodes. With an understanding that one city’s resilience
is tied to the resilience of other cities, coordinated national cli-
mate action plans become more important.
Principle Four: Foster a Design and Research Culture That
Considers the Impact of the Built Environment on Lifestyles
and Behaviors That Shape Land Use
Urban land change fundamentally transforms how people
live. The connectivity of roads, the design of the streetscape,
and the mix of land uses can have a significant impact on
9
v Figure 4. Landsat OLI/TIRS image of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Canals, which are the basis of bike lane routes, are shown in black inside
the city (blue). (Credit: Karen Seto and Meredith Reba, from City Unseen)
transportation energy consumption, influencing whether resi-
dents walk, bike, drive, or take public transit (Ewing and Cervero
2010). For example, connected cycle paths, shown tracing
Amsterdam’s elaborate canal system in Figure 4, provide a via-
ble, low-emissions way to get around the city. More than 40%
of trips in the greater metropolitan Amsterdam area are made
by bike. Amsterdam’s compact mixed-use development also
helps make services and jobs more accessible, lessening trans-
portation emissions. For space heating and cooling of buildings
as well, a household living in a compactly arranged neighbor-
hood could be expected to consume 20% less energy annually
than the same household in a dispersed neighborhood (Norman
et al. 2006; Ewing and Rong 2008). Urban energy consump-
tion translates into land change both immediately, through
the sourcing of fuel, and eventually, as land systems—includ-
ing agricultural land, forests, glaciated land, and vegetation—
are impacted by climate change. By facilitating low-emissions
behaviors, urban land can help reduce stress to all other land
systems impacted by climate change.
Urban designers, planners, and architects have developed a
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rich tradition of exploring how light, materials, color, and space
affect human comfort, performance, senses, and behavior at
the building scale. Yet there is surprisingly little science on how
and to what extent urban-scale land patterns shape human
energy, water, and material-consuming behaviors. Design prac-
titioners and researchers are positioned to be at the fore-
front of advancing this scholarship and of elevating its impact,
informing developers how to construct environments that allow
urban residents to live healthier, low-emission, and less-land-
intensive lives.
Urbanization as a Land Conservation Opportunity
There is ongoing discussion of two main strategies within land
conservation. The first strategy, “land sharing,” proposes boost-
ing the ability of human-use-dominated land to simultaneously
serve important ecological functions. The second strategy,
“land sparing,” proposes minimizing the quantity of land needed
by humans so as to preserve wild nature. Urbanization is one of
humanity’s most effective “land sparing” strategies, and a criti-
cal conservation opportunity of the present era. Recognizing
this opportunity frames urbanization through a new lens, one
that is a stark departure from prior environmental discourses in
which cities have been often regarded as scars on the natural
landscape. By making our settlements more compact, we save
room for the myriad of other land functions needed to support
and sustain life on Earth.
However, to fully capitalize on the land conservation poten-
tials of urbanization, all associated land transitions must also
be considered. Urbanization is often experienced as a rela-
tively site-specific local phenomenon, one that only consists
of the direct conversion of rural land into the built environ-
ment; but as discussed, urbanization activates several other
land transitions that drive environmental change globally. New
 Principles for Minimizing Global Land Impacts of Urbanization 10

Shughrue, C., and K. C. Seto. 2018. “Systemic Vulnerabilities

research and partnerships between science and practice are
urgently needed to map these less apparent linkages, connect-
ing local urban land change to its ripple and leapfrog effects
elsewhere. There is an opportunity for conservation scien-
tists and design and planning practitioners—from historically
unallied fields—to collaborate more closely in moving devel-
opment forward to accomplish conservation goals, translat-
ing the principles discussed into concrete strategies for design
practice. The aims of urban land shapers, focused on creating
vibrant built landscapes, and natural land sparers, focused on
sustaining vibrant wild landscapes, are symbiotic and synergis-
tic. Cooperative efforts between these fields would help pro-
duce built environments with minimal land impacts, capitalizing
on urbanization’s potential to be a conservation solution and
protecting the landscapes, ecosystems, and resources on which
humanity depends.
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Eleanor C. Stokes is an Assistant Research Scientist with the
Terrestrial Information Systems Lab at NASA Goddard Space
Flight Center. Her research focuses on the use of satellite data
to understand changing urban land patterns and their links
to environmental and social outcomes. She received her PhD
in environmental science from Yale School of Forestry and
Environmental Studies and her MS in mechanical engineering
from MIT. Stokes also has experience in the private sector as an
environmental building design consultant.
Karen C. Seto is the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography
and Urbanization Science in the School of Forestry and
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