1 Possible Future Transport and Land Use Strategies for Sustainable Urban Development in European Cities

The concept of sustainable development has led to a paradigm shift in urban planning in European cities. In recent years air pollution, traffic noise and loss of open space and more recently energy scarcity and climate change have become leading issues of urban planning. This paper looks into the achievements and challenges of transport and land use planning in European cities today. It starts with an overview on current policies at the European level to promote a better integration of transport and land use planning in European cities, summarises the results of studies on integrated transport and land-use strategies and presents examples of successful best practice in this field in European cities. To demonstrate the magnitude of the challenge, it presents results of the EU project STEPs (Scenarios for the Transport System and Energy Supply and their Potential Effects), which examined the impact of different scenarios of fuel price increases, resulting market responses and different combinations of transport and land use policies on regional economic development, travel patterns and the environment in metropolitan areas using several European and urban/regional simulation models. 1