Spatiotemporal built-up patterns of 3 Romanian and 3 Polish cities

This dataset contains the derived spatial data and summary indicators used in the article “Divergent land consumption trajectories in post-socialist Romania and Poland: A spatiotemporal analysis of built-up expansion (1975–2020)”. It provides open, fine-scale evidence on built-up growth patterns in six second-tier cities in Central and Eastern Europe: Szczecin, Bydgoszcz and Lublin (Poland) and Timișoara, Cluj-Napoca and Iași (Romania). The dataset is based on the Global Human Settlements Layer (GHSL) products produced by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. We use the GHS-BUILT-S (built-up surface), GHS-BUILT-V (built-up volume) and GHS-POP (population) grids at 100 m resolution for the epochs 1975, 1990, 2000 and 2015, which we process to estimate total built-up area and built-up area per capita over time. The original GHSL rasters are not redistributed here and can be downloaded directly from the JRC. The main spatial unit of analysis is a regular 100 × 100 m grid covering a 20 km road-distance radius around each city centre. For each grid cell, we compute:– Total built-up area per epoch (m²), based on the combination of GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-BUILT-V and an assumed standard floor height;– Population per epoch (persons), from GHS-POP;– Built-up area per capita per epoch (m²/person);– A categorical cluster ID representing one of ten recurrent space–time development patterns identified via time-series clustering of total built-up area trajectories;– City identifier and basic locational attributes. The dataset is organised in the following files:– Two vector files (Shapefile) containing the 100 m grid cells for all six cities, with attributes for city ID, cluster ID, cluster colour, total built-up area by epoch, population by epoch and built-up area per capita by epoch;– Two Excel files summarising cluster-level statistics (e.g. total area, average built-up area per capita, population) by country;– A codebook / README describing variables, units, and processing steps. The purpose of this dataset is to allow users to: (i) replicate the main quantitative results and figures reported in the article; (ii) explore the space–time patterns of built-up expansion across the six case-study cities; and (iii) reuse the classification of development clusters in comparative research on post-socialist urbanisation, land consumption and sprawl. Users should note that all derived indicators are subject to the spatial and temporal uncertainties inherent in GHSL products and the methodological assumptions described in the article (e.g. uniform floor height). The data are provided for research and teaching purposes and should be interpreted in conjunction with the methodological description in the associated paper.