Regional planning and development (RPD) are not just national, regional, and local concerns, but also a European priority. Indeed, the European Commission adopted the ‘European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP)’ at the Potsdam Council Meeting in May 1999. This paper proposes to the Member States and regions an analysis of economic, demographic, and environmental trends in the European Union so as to help them to coordinate national RPD policies.

The CORINE Land Cover data provide a unique snapshot of the spatial organisation of the territories making up the European Union at the end of the 1980s. This snapshot is actually a 1/100,000 scale digital map of land cover (or use) compiled from interpretation of a wealth of satellite images, aerial photographs, and topographic and thematic maps. These data have been broken down into 44 cover types (arranged in a hierarchical key) for the entire continent. The maps are produced by visual interpretation of hard copy satellite images after appropriate pre-processing (geometric corrections, boundary sharpening and contrast enhancement) and manual digitising to yield 1/100,000 scale photographic-quality digital maps with minimum mappable units of 25 ha. Elements that are less than 100 metres wide are not represented.

The pan-European land cover inventory gives a very clear view of the various regions and their particularities, despite a simplified key (2nd level of the hierarchy, containing 14 classes). So, you can pick out urban areas, agricultural production areas, forests, etc.

A general view of the CORINE Land Cover inventory for Belgium shows the various landscape regions in such a way as to reflect both the major geological structures and spatial variations in the lay of the land and land cover, human settlement, and land use. It is possible to describe the land-cover associations visible on this scale from the coast to the border with Lorraine and starting with the major urban areas.

This inventory has been the starting point for the reconstitution of land-cover developments in two areas that have been subject to particularly high pressure from humans over the past 50 to 100 years, i.e., the Belgian coast and Brussels as a morphological unit (or Greater Brussels). Both projects were carried out for the Centre of Earth Observation (JRC-CEO) to support the EU’s regional planning and development policies.

Inventories, a picture of reality
Cartographic inventories of and mapping changes in land cover and use based on satellite imagery, aerial photos, and topographic and thematic maps, are obviously merely sources of information about our territory past and present. They are only pictures of reality that enable us to grasp the complexity and particularities of territories’ spatial organisation and recent changes therein. These maps are drawn to a specific geographic scale. This scale must be adapted to the scale of regional planning and development, that is to say, to the scale of the authority (local, regional, national, or European) in charge of the intervention. It is then up to the geographer or regional planner to use this information to set RPD plans on relevant levels that allow for the territory’s diversity and specificity.