Spatial structure and governance of urban densification – between spatial planning and market forces

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Stefan Siedentop; Professor Dr. Hannes Taubenböck
• Subject Area: City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 567671490

To date, urbanization has primarily been understood as a soico-demographic and spatial expansion process that is articulated as population growth in settlement areas categorized as “urban”. This is closely linked to the growth of populated areas in the suburban peripheries of metropolitan areas and urban regions. For a long time, however, far less attention was paid to the densification of urbanized areas, although this contributes significantly to the demographic, economic and physical dynamics of urbanization. Only recently has this empirical phenomenon received greater attention. Nevertheless, little is known about the morphological and functional characteristics of densification, the socio-economic driving forces that promote or inhibit it and the way in which it is shaped by urban policy and spatial planning. The proposed project addresses this research gap by pursuing two interrelated objectives: Using a remote sensing approach that employs new machine learning methods, urban densification in six major German cities will be detected and analyzed at high spatial resolution over a period of approximately 10 years. Building on this, the project will examine how densification processes are institutionalized in urban development and urban land-use planning in the selected cities. This will be carried out using a governance and instrument-analytical approach based primarily on document analyses and expert interviews. The project promises new insights into the complex “geography” of urban densification, its quantitative extent and the relevance of spatial planning.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants