Quantifying demand for built-up area – a comparison of approaches and application to regions with stagnating population

Land use changes in urban environments can lead to huge pressures for governments. Accurate projections of future developments of built-up areas are crucial for sustainable development and protecting the natural environment. This article reviews approaches to project developments of built-up areas. A selection of these approaches is applied to Germany and the Czech Republic, and the results are quantitatively compared. The advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches are analysed and discussed. The results reveal a high uncertainty when projecting past changes with the selected approaches. The spatial scale, variable selection and the spatial structure of the study area have a significant influence on the results. Both study areas are characterised by metropolitan areas and rural populated regions. Achieving high-accuracy projections for rural and urban areas remains difficult.