Urban Permeation (UP) 2009 (LEAC Grid), Nov. 2016

Urban Permeation (UP) is a measure of the permeation of a landscape by built‑up areas; it describes the degree to which the landscape is permeated by patches of built-up area. It is calculated from the new urban sprawl metric "Weighted Urban Proliferation“ (WUP). Weighted Urban Proliferation is based on the following definition of urban sprawl: the more area is built over in a given landscape (amount of built-up area) and the more dispersed this built-up area is in the landscape (spatial configuration), and the higher the uptake of built-up area per inhabitant or job (lower utilisation intensity in the built-up area), the higher the degree of urban sprawl.
The WUP metric has three components: the percentage of built-up areas (PBA), the dispersion of the built-up areas (DIS), and land uptake per person (LUP).
UP is a product of PBA and DIS. It represents the spread of the built-up areas in the landscape. UP is expressed in urban permeation units per m2 of land (UPU/m2).
The UP dataset is used in EEA's Urban Sprawl work indicating urbanisation impacts on the land system. It covers EEA39.