Galway urban sprawl, 1990–2025

Thirty-five years of land cover change around Galway City, measured with CORINE data, density gradients and centroid shift.

Question

How far and in which direction has Galway's built-up area spread since 1990, and how did planning policy shape it?

Tools

QGIS, R

Data

CORINE Land Cover (1990–2018 series and latest release), Galway City Development Plans

CRS

Irish Transverse Mercator (EPSG:2157)

Context

BSc dissertation, University of Galway. Graded 78%.

Problem

Galway is one of the fastest-growing cities in Ireland. This project measured where that growth went between 1990 and 2025, and whether development followed the city plans or locked in a low-density pattern that later plans struggled to reverse (path dependency).

Data

• CORINE Land Cover layers for each available year, reclassified to artificial surfaces vs. other cover
• Galway City Development Plans, coded qualitatively for policy on density and expansion

Method

• Reprojected all layers to ITM (EPSG:2157) so distances and areas are in metres
• Calculated artificial-surface area per year and the change between periods
• Built density gradients: share of built-up land in rings at set distances from the city centre
• Tracked the centroid of built-up land each year to measure the direction and distance of shift
• Coded development plan text for themes such as compact growth and suburban expansion, then compared policy timing with the spatial change

Result

Built-up land change around Galway City, 1990–2025.

Add: your final change map in place of the placeholder above, plus 2–3 findings with numbers. For example: total growth in artificial surface (hectares or %), how far the centroid moved and in which direction, and which plan period lines up with the biggest change.

Code

Add: link to the GitHub repo with the R scripts, e.g. https://github.com/carlos6is/galway-urban-sprawl