Researchers argue that greenbelts almost always work in curbing sprawl, particularly in larger cities. It looks at 60 cities in Europe, half of them with a greenbelt, half without, and uses open-source data to compare changes in and levels of urban sprawl between 2006 and 2015. ‘We noticed decreases in urban sprawl in 27 of the 30 cities that had greenbelts, so we can say that overall, greenbelts are very effective,’ says the study’s lead author, Parnian Pourtaherian, MSc 21. Jochen Jaeger, an associate professor of geography, planning and environment in the Faculty of Arts and Science, co-authored the paper.
