Is There Urban Landscape in Metropolitan Areas? An Unobvious Answer Based on Corine Land Cover Analyses

The recent increase in urban areas has stimulated landscape urbanization. One of the ways to study this process is an analysis based on the structure of land cover. The aim of this paper is to assess the intensity of the urban landscape on the basis of the CORINE in the seven largest metropolitan areas in Poland and in the Ruhr Metropolis in Germany. To this end, an urban landscape intensity indicator (ULII) was used based on Corine Land Cover at three levels of detail: the metropolitan area, municipalities and hexagons. There are similarities in landscape structure in areas with similar origin (industrial function) and spatial organization (mono- and polycentric agglomerations). The landscape of the Upper Silesia-Zagłębie Metropolis differs from the landscape of other metropolitan areas in Poland and simultaneously shows similarities to the landscape of the Ruhr Metropolis. The results of the ULII also revealed a dependency: the dominance of rural and transitional landscapes in a majority of the study areas. Urban landscapes occur only in the central zones of the metropolitan areas. This proves that determining the range of a metropolitan area in terms of landscape factors is different from doing it with formal or legal ones.