Jacob Lovie

As cities continue to expand, and more of humanity moved from rural setting into urbanized areas, there is an important need to understand the impacts of how we urbanize on the environment. Knowledge on how to urbanize sustainably can ensure that we ae managing our global footprint on the environment while still progressing as a society. The research takes a multi-step approach to understand the dynamics of urbanization across Europe and its impact on environmental sustainability. 36 metrics that comprised the analysis of the urban landscape configuration and 8 metrics used to analyse the urban land composition of countries across Europe were tested against the human development index (HDI) and ecological footprint (EF) to understand the relationships between urban morphology and sustainability. Data was retrieved across four sets of years, 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018 to ensure correlations were consistent and to understand if there were changes over time. The study first explored the bivariate relationships between the landscape metrics and sustainability indicators. After this, spatial relationships were explored through a Global Moran’s I test at both global and local levels to reveal spatial autocorrelation among any variables. Finally, key metrics identified were used in two multivariate analysis. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) was first computed to create global models and to find an optimized model for each year and were computed separately for each indicator. Conditional Autoregressive (CAR) models were then computed on the most optimized models to reduce bias of spatial autocorrelation among the variables and to validate against the OLS models. Finally, a temporal exploration of key variables was conducted to see the trends of variables over time. The results showed that there are important relationships among urban morphology and its impact on both socio-economic and environmental sustainability.