Built-up area in the context of "Urbanism"

Land consumption as part of human resource consumption is the conversion of land with healthy soil and intact habitats into areas for industrial agriculture, traffic (road building) and especially urban human settlements. More formally, the EEA has identified three land consuming activities:

1. The expansion of built-up area which can be directly measured;
2. the absolute extent of land that is subject to exploitation by agriculture, forestry or other economic activities; and
3. the over-intensive exploitation of land that is used for agriculture and forestry.

In all of those respects, land consumption is equivalent to typical land use in industrialized regions and civilizations.

A bypass is a road or highway that avoids or "bypasses" a built-up area, town, or village, to let through traffic flow without interference from local traffic, to reduce congestion in the built-up area, to improve road safety and as replacement for obsolete roads that are no longer in use as a result of devastating natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, volcanic eruptions). A bypass specifically designated for trucks may be called a truck route.

If there are no strong land use controls, buildings are often built in town along a bypass, converting it into an ordinary town road, and the bypass may eventually become as congested as the local streets it was intended to avoid. Many businesses are often built there for ease of access, while homes are often avoided for noise and pollution reasons.

In urban planning, transit-oriented development (TOD) is a type of urban development that maximizes the amount of residential, business and leisure space within walking distance of public transport. It promotes a symbiotic relationship between dense, compact urban form and public transport use. In doing so, TOD aims to increase public transport ridership by reducing the use of private cars and by promoting sustainable urban growth.

TOD typically includes a central transit stop (such as a train station, or light rail or bus stop) surrounded by a high-density mixed-use area, with lower-density areas spreading out from this center, serving as part of an integrated transport network. TOD is also typically designed to be more walkable than other built-up areas, by using smaller block sizes and reducing the land area dedicated to automobiles. In some areas, it may include ferries. Areas that center a transit station as a hub while building residential-focused TOD development in the immediate area are known as transit villages.