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Land use efficiency in Functional Urban Areas, 2018
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The term land use efficiency focuses on the use of artificial areas in FUAs in proportion of inhabitants. As a measure for quantification, the amount of artificial area per capita is used. It has to be stressed that thresholds in this regard have neither been discussed nor defined yet. As of today, we can only compare land use efficiency of defined regions and observe high, low and average values. The use of artificial area per capita is also addressed in the SDG11.3.1 indicator Land consumption per capita. In this chapter land use efficiency is adjusted to the SDG11.3.1 concept and urban green areas are not considered when addressing artificial areas.
Low land use efficiency means that few people use a lot of artificial area, hence the amount of artificial area per capita is high. This is typically the case in remote rural areas, where buildings have only one or two floors and the road network is frequented by few people.
High land use efficiency means that small amounts of artificial area are used by many inhabitants. This is only possible if buildings have several floors and the built infrastructure, in particular the road network and public transport, are frequented by many persons. Very high land use efficiency can be observed in city centres of very large metropoles. A drawback of high land use efficiency is the fact that also sealing rates are high and hence unsealed surfaces and vegetation are low.