Economic downturns have shaped the intrinsic mechanisms underlying urban expansion worldwide. Despite strength and pervasiveness of recent recessions, empirical results documenting the aggregate effect of economic downturns on urbanization and land-use change in Southern Europe are rather scarce. By considering a sequence of expansion and recession waves in Greece, our study verifies if land-use change differed in entity and spatial direction at two time intervals (2006–2012, 2012–2018) in the Athens’ metropolitan region. Different processes of urban transformation and landscape change were detected analysing Urban Atlas (1:10,000) change maps. The framework proposed in this study integrates a classical approach of landscape ecology grounded on the analysis of land-use metrics with a broader perspective linking regional science to spatial planning. To discriminate morphological from functional urbanization traits typical of expansions and recessions, our study performs a comparative analysis of seven trajectories of land-use change. Results identify a moderate expansion of residential settlements during 2006–2012, and a more evident growth of industrial settlements during 2012–2018. A significant increase in the number and size of forest patches converted to urban use was observed with recession, highlighting the increased vulnerability of relict natural sites with low economic value and high ecological potential. Crisis dynamics have stimulated an intensive use of fringe spaces for small residential settlements. By exalting local-scale specificities toward settlement densification and extensification on both greenfields and brownfields, economic downturns in metropolitan regions made land-use changes largely dependent on the background socioeconomic local context.

经济衰退塑造了全球城市扩张的内在机制。尽管近期经济衰退的力度和普遍性很强，但记录经济衰退对南欧城市化和土地利用变化的总体影响的实证结果却相当稀少。通过考虑希腊的一系列扩张和衰退浪潮，我们的研究验证了雅典大都市区在两个时间间隔（2006-2012、2012-2018）的实体和空间方向上的土地利用变化是否不同。通过分析 Urban Atlas (1:10,000) 变化图检测到城市转型和景观变化的不同过程。本研究中提出的框架将基于土地利用指标分析的经典景观生态学方法与将区域科学与空间规划联系起来的更广泛的视角相结合。为了区分典型的扩张和衰退的形态特征和功能性城市化特征，我们的研究对土地利用变化的七个轨迹进行了比较分析。结果表明，2006-2012 年期间住宅区适度扩张，2012-2018 年工业区增长更为明显。随着经济衰退，转变为城市用途的森林斑块的数量和规模显着增加，突出了经济价值低、生态潜力高的废弃自然遗址的脆弱性增加。危机动态刺激了小型住宅区边缘空间的密集使用。通过在绿地和棕地上提高当地规模对聚落致密化和扩展的特殊性，