Analysing and Managing Urban Sprawl and Land Take

In this paper «land take» and its drivers within the urbanization process is studied with a focus on recent developments in Italy. Several sources of information, recently made available by national and European agencies, are used to highlight the main characteristics of land take, its determinants, its spatial pattern and its evolutionary trends. Finally, after a short review of initiatives, actions and policies designed and implemented at different institutional levels (local, national, European) to tackle the question of urban sprawl and land take, we focus on some critical issues such as: reliability of measurement, scale of spatial planning, policy coordination and re-distributional aspects arising from the regulation of land property and rent.