The future land demand from economic activities

Assessments of urban land demand mostly focus on growth in residential land, which is typically determined by projected household growth in a region. This implies that other types of urban land demand, e.g., for industries, retail, and services, are often neglected. This may be due to limited data availability on the land claimed by economic activities, or to their assumed limited importance relative to residential land demand. Batista e Silva et al. (2014) offer one of the few exceptions of studies that investigate the land demand for economic activities, but they distinguish only two economic sectors: industries and commercial services. Other studies focus on individual economic sectors such as logistic services (Tare et al., 2023). In this research, we look at the specific developments of a wide range of economic sectors in the Netherlands between 1996 and 2015 that together comprise all land developed for economic activities
other than agriculture and mining. We distinguish between changes in gross land use (inferred from national land-use statistics), net land use (inferred from building footprints) and number of employees (from firm registration databases). Following an extensive data fusion approach, we are able to link gross and net area changes per sector to employment changes and establish changing land intensity measures per job in specific sectors. We find that the gross area associated with economic activities grew by 22% between 1996 and 2015.
This is more than the growth in residential areas over the same period, which was 14%. Most of this increase came from the logistics sector. Interestingly, employment in this sector was roughly stable, indicating a large increase in the land area per job. On the other hand, employment in public and business services increased substantially, while their area only grew marginally. So, while we see extensification in industry, we see intensification in offices. These insights are applied to construct assessments of future urban land demand until 2050 relying on scenario-specific employment projections. The total national urban area growth associated with economic development is close to 380 km2 (1.18% of the Dutch land area), slightly more than the urban area growth associated with a slowly stagnating population growth.