In recent decades, Europe has experienced an unprecedented urban growth affecting fragile ecosystems and natural habitats. Urban development in coastal zones, combined with city expansion, has led to irreversible adverse consequences for land use and to environmental degradation. The delicate balance between stability in urban areas and biodiversity, in both urban and rural areas, relates in essence to sustainability and economic development. This economic development in southern Europe is especially affected by service industries such as tourism. Preventing land-use degradation and environmental change is of the utmost importance for land-use management. This is particularly necessary in coastal zones, where contributing factors of a human (e.g. land-use change, pollution) or natural (e.g. erosion, changes in sea level) kind require important strategies to be designed for regional and urban planning. As the basic objective of sustainability and coastal management is the transmission of environmental assets to future generations, it is imperative to take into consideration the dimension of urban change and its impacts on the landscape in relation to socioeconomic driving forces. The application of the spatial realities of land use within temporal dynamics allows the ex-ante assessment of spatial planning policies. Such impact assessments have become important tools for the supervision of decision making within land-use dynamics. The combination of economic, social, and natural consequences questions the application of complex systems theory within patiotemporal dynamics in supporting regional decision making. In this context, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), combined with spatial data inventories, can provide a more accurate representation of the dynamics of urban change within land-use dynamics as part of complex systems. This paper proposes an analysis of the impact of tourism as an attractor of urban growth, leading to the loss of rural agricultural land use. By using spatial data inventories retrieved from the CORINE Land Cover Project in 1990, 2000 and 2006, this paper analyses urban sprawl tendencies associated with coastal tourist attractors. Mass tourism is defined in terms of weak and strong sustainability, depending on the distance of urban sprawl to tourist points of interest. While the ecological objective is to recognize the importance of balancing urban and rural choices within spatially sustainable land use, from an economic perspective, the lack of equilibrium in urban tourist choices underlines the need for better management of the service sectors in coastal regions.
