scholarly journals Big Science, Ethics, and the Scalar Effects of Urban Planning

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 217-226
Author(s):  
Sandra Kopljar

The urban expansion currently under development around the two materials science facilities MAX IV and European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden, surrounds two meticulously designed research facilities steered by global demands. The new urban area, together with the research facilities dedicated to science and the development of knowledge, expands the city of Lund onto high-quality agricultural land. In doing so, the municipal planning is attempting to align contemporary ideas of sustainable urban development with large-scale scientific infrastructure. This actualizes an ethical dilemma as the urban expansion onto productive agricultural land overrides previous decisions taken by the municipality regarding land use. It can also be understood as going against national land use policy which states that development on productive agricultural land should be avoided. As the planning stands today, the research facilities heavily push local urban development into the area while the intended research outcomes primarily relate to a global research community tied to international scientific demands for materials science. Although the Brunnshög area is realized through a neutralizing planning strategy, thought to balance and compensate for the development on farmland, the effects of the counterbalancing acts are primarily played out at a local urban level in terms of diverse, exciting, and locally sustainable neighbourhoods. The land use protection policies meant to secure national food production rather operates on a national scale. The argument made in this text is that sustainable development, and the intended balancing acts it involves, ought to be carefully considered in terms of scalar effects. Sustainable planning<em> </em>effects’ <em>scalar extent</em> should be taken into account through careful assessment of the step between good intentions and expected outcomes.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 110-118
Author(s):  
Ibimilua Adewale Festus ◽  
Ibimilua Foyeke Omoboye ◽  
Ogundare Babatope Andrew

Urban Sprawl is a disturbing issue to geographers, urban planners and allied professionals in the 21st century.  The anxiety is based mainly on the social, political, economic, cultural and environmental consequences of rapid urban growth.  Hence, this study examines the reasons for urbanization, as well as encroachment of urban development into the border belt.  Next, the study probes into the causes, consequences and adverse effects of uncontrolled infringement and conversion of rural land to urban uses.  Likewise, the study investigates the processes of land use development, population expansion and physical growth, as well as their ecological foot prints.  Consequently, the study identified the major causes of urban sprawl as rapid population increase, high level of urban development pressure, provision of housing, changes in living standard, as well as technological changes among others.  Also, the study found out that urban sprawl is desirable because of the benefits of spread of development, low rent at the periphery, as well as lesser pressure on the environment of the border belt.  Also, the effects of urban sprawl were recognized as destruction of the means of livelihood of the rural dwellers at the urban fringe belt, land fragmentation, food scarcity, changes in the ecosystem, environmental pollution, biodiversity loss, as well as loss of wildlife habitat.  For the achievement of sustainable urban development in the 21st century and beyond, the study recommends environmental monitoring with the aid of geographic information systems and remote sensing techniques, environmental impact assessment, development control, farm land policy, regulation of land allocation, sustainable land use management, as well as enforcement of planning policies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 2451
Author(s):  
Yulin Dong ◽  
Zhibin Ren ◽  
Yao Fu ◽  
Zhenghong Miao ◽  
Ran Yang ◽  
...  

Cities, the core of the global climate change and economic development, are high impact land cover land use change (LCLUC) hotspots. Comprehensive records of land cover land use dynamics in urban regions are essential for strategic climate change adaption and mitigation and sustainable urban development. This study aims to develop a Google Earth Engine (GEE) application for high-resolution (15-m) urban LCLUC mapping with a novel classification scheme using pan-sharpened Landsat images. With this approach, we quantified the annual LCLUC in Changchun, China, from 2000 to 2019, and detected the abrupt changes (turning points of LCLUC). Ancillary data on social-economic status were used to provide insights on potential drivers of LCLUC by examining their correlation with change rate. We also examined the impacts of LCLUC on environment, specifically air pollution. Using this approach, we can classify annual LCLUC in Changchun with high accuracy (all above 0.91). The change detection based on the high-resolution wall-to-wall maps show intensive urban expansion with the compromise of cropland from 2000 to 2019. We also found the growth of green space in urban regions as the result of green space development and management in recent years. The changing rate of different land types were the largest in the early years of the observation period. Turning points of land types were primarily observed in 2009 and 2010. Further analysis showed that economic and industry development and population migration collectively drove the urban expansion in Changchun. Increasing built-up areas could slow wind velocity and air exchange, and ultimately led to the accumulation of PM2.5. Our implement of pan-sharpened Landsat images facilitates the wall-to-wall mapping of temporal land dynamics at high spatial resolution. The primary use of GEE for mapping urban land makes it replicable and transferable by other users. This approach is a first crucial step towards understanding the drivers of change and supporting better decision-making for sustainable urban development and climate change mitigation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 02001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Bondarev ◽  
Sergey Nosov ◽  
Oleg Antipov ◽  
Lusine Papikian

Agricultural and forest lands near settlements are main reserve for expansion of urban areas. Thus, among 148.5 thousand hectares of lands added to Moscow city territory in 2012, 72.2 thousand hectares or 48% were occupied by agricultural and forest lands. Urban areas are characterized by excessively high intensity of land use, land depletion, deterioration in environmental quality and decline in sustainability of urban development. The paper presents the results of analysis of urban land use planning system in the interests of sustainable development of urban territories. The object of the study is the land that is part of Moscow, which is planned to be developed in the coming decades. The authors propose an algorithm for urban development of such areas, which takes into account the quality of land. Design calculations for areas under development were carried out for Shchapovskoye settlement in New Moscow as an example. In addition, the paper covers aspects of land management when developing agricultural land within cities. The authors developed a classification of agricultural land according to a criterion of “suitability for urban development”. The suggested classification has been applied to achieve the objectives of planning urban land use development, determining the order of construction on agricultural lands within the system of sustainable urban development management.


Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 312
Author(s):  
Barbara Wiatkowska ◽  
Janusz Słodczyk ◽  
Aleksandra Stokowska

Urban expansion is a dynamic and complex phenomenon, often involving adverse changes in land use and land cover (LULC). This paper uses satellite imagery from Landsat-5 TM, Landsat-8 OLI, Sentinel-2 MSI, and GIS technology to analyse LULC changes in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020. The research was carried out in Opole, the capital of the Opole Agglomeration (south-western Poland). Maps produced from supervised spectral classification of remote sensing data revealed that in 20 years, built-up areas have increased about 40%, mainly at the expense of agricultural land. Detection of changes in the spatial pattern of LULC showed that the highest average rate of increase in built-up areas occurred in the zone 3–6 km (11.7%) and above 6 km (10.4%) from the centre of Opole. The analysis of the increase of built-up land in relation to the decreasing population (SDG 11.3.1) has confirmed the ongoing process of demographic suburbanisation. The paper shows that satellite imagery and GIS can be a valuable tool for local authorities and planners to monitor the scale of urbanisation processes for the purpose of adapting space management procedures to the changing environment.


Author(s):  
Hildegarde Vandenhove

The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has raised questions about the accumulation of radionuclides in soils, the transfer in the foodchain and the possibility of continued restricted future land use. This paper summarizes what is generally understood about the application of agricultural countermeasures as a land management option to reduce the radionuclides transfer in the food chain and to facilitate the return of potentially affected soils to agricultural practices in areas impacted by a nuclear accident.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 286
Author(s):  
Dingrao Feng ◽  
Wenkai Bao ◽  
Meichen Fu ◽  
Min Zhang ◽  
Yiyu Sun

Land use change plays a key role in terrestrial systems and drives the process of ecological pattern change. It is important to investigate the process of land use change, predict land use patterns, and reveal the characteristics of land use dynamics. In this study, we adopted the Markov model and future land use (FLUS) model to predict the future land use conditions in Xi’an city. Furthermore, we investigated the characteristics of land use change from a novel perspective, i.e., via establishment of a complex network model. This model captured the characteristics of the land use system during different periods. The results indicated that urban expansion and cropland loss played an important role in land use pattern change. The future gravity center of urban development moved along the opposite direction to that from 2000 to 2015 in Xi’an city. Although the rate of urban expansion declined in the future, urban expansion remained the primary driver of land use change. The primary urban development directions were east-southeast (ENE), north-northeast (NNE) and west-southwest (WSW) from 1990 to 2000, 2000 to 2015, and 2015 to 2030, respectively. In fact, cropland played a vital role in land use dynamics regarding all land use types, and the stability of the land use system decreased in the future. Our study provides future land use patterns and a novel perspective to better understand land use change.


SIMULATION ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (7) ◽  
pp. 583-591
Author(s):  
Hongzhi Lin ◽  
Yongping Zhang

Urban development usually deteriorates the transportation system. For sustainable urban development, policymakers often face the challenging problem of how to optimally allocate overall land use quotas across a number of residential locations according to the performance of the transportation system. This is a kind of Stackelberg competition, where policymakers make land use decisions and travelers make behavioral responses. A novel bi-level model is formulated to solve this problem. The upper-level model minimizes the total system travel time by land use allocation, while at the lower level are sequential models with feedback for transportation system equilibrium. The Dirichlet allocation algorithm, a simulation-based heuristic algorithm, is designed to solve this bi-level model. A simulation experiment using the Nguyen–Dupuis network is then used to verify the proposed model and algorithm. The results from the simulation experiment demonstrate that not only are the model and algorithm operational but that they also provide an effective tool for policymakers to plan for land use development.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Rong Guo ◽  
Xiaoya Song ◽  
Peiran Li ◽  
Guangming Wu ◽  
Zhiling Guo

Urban sustainable renewal has received extensive attention in a wide range of fields, including urban planning, urban management, energy management, and transportation. Given that environmental resource conservation is critical to urban sustainability renewal, this study highlighted the imbalance among green space, urban development, and transportation accessibility. Here, a novel node-place-green model is presented to measure sustainable urban development; meanwhile, deep learning is utilized to identify and extract the green space to measure the environmental index. Based on the generated node, place, and green value, urban developing status could be classified into nine modes for further analysis of transportation, urban function, and ecological construction. The experimental results of Harbin reveal the feasibility of the proposed method in providing specific guidelines for urban planning and policies on sustainable development.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (11) ◽  
pp. 56-62
Author(s):  
Elvira Gromilina ◽  

The problem of urban planning in the context of globalization and the intensification of urban growth is considered in the context of sustainable development. Under UN-Habitat regulations, urban development must be in line with five principles: compactness, high density, mixed use, variety, limited land-use specialization. Compact urban development is a model for sustainable urban development, based on the synergy of three main dimensions: social, economic and environmental. In contrast to the approach to territorial zoning, the compact city model pays attention not only to the development of mixed land use, but also to social needs in places of employment, leisure, recreation, as well as the need for economic resources. In order to identify strategies for designing a sustainable architectural and planning structure, theoretical approaches to the practice of urban planning are investigated. Implementation of the provisions of UN-Habitat is aimed at reducing energy consumption and harmful emissions, preserving biodiversity, reducing the cost of infrastructure and increasing labor productivity, which helps to achieve a balance of social, economic and environmental goals of sustainable development.


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