Projecting rates of urbanisation in England, 1991-2016: method, policy application and results

"The rate of conversion of land from rural to urban uses has been a central concern of the British planning system. Despite this interest, however, the factual basis of the debate on the pace of urban growth, its form and distribution has been extremely weak. The reason for this is lack of appropriate data. This paper reports research on two new data sources on land use--a digital database of the boundaries of tracts of urban land in 1981 and 1991 and the Land Use Change Statistics--to analyse recent urban growth in England and, in conjunction with current household projections, to estimate the likely extent of urbanisation in 2016. In addition to assessing the geographical distribution of this growth, the paper draws out some implications for policy analysis of the method of projecting the extent of land in urban use."