Urban transformations in a Mediterranean island state : the case of Malta

Abstract

Land is a limited natural resource. One of the main land uses is related to settlement development, which plays a central role in a myriad of human activities. The expansion of these settlements is referred to as urban growth and generally happens at the expense of natural and agricultural land cover. Measuring and understanding these growth patterns is of vital importance for land management and planning. This need is more accentuated in a small-island states given the scarcity of this resource. This study aims to investigate urban growth in Malta and develop future trajectories for growth using data retrieved from local development planning applications submitted to Malta’s Planning Authority, the authority responsible for development control and planning in the islands. A web scraping technique was used to extract data from the public online database and a text mining approach was used to identify keywords implying urban growth from the granted development planning applications’ descriptors. The study investigates the different forms of urban growth happening over the last thirty years: infilling, edge-expansion and outlying development. These were used to test the applicability of the Theory of Diffusion and Coalescence to the case of Malta. Moreover, the study looked at various predictors of urban growth presented in the literature and determined, which of these are those that are applicable to Malta’s case. These predictors were subsequently used to model urban growth in Malta using logistic regression. The model developed predicted simulations showing the areas likely to experience urban growth in future years. In conclusion, the patterns determined in the study were analysed and discussed. The outcomes of this work will lead to better measurement of urban growth in Malta and concurrently provide new methods that can be used in the study of planning and land management.