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- Info
Population growth beyond the urban fringe: Implications for rural land use policy
| Author: |
LaGro, James A., Jr. |
| Date: |
1994 |
| Periodical: |
Landscape and Urban Planning |
| Abstract: |
Population growth and redistribution generate urban development in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties throughout the USA. This paper presents an analysis of population growth and urban development within a non-metropolitan county in southeastern New York State. Land use data for a 30 km by 50 km study area were integrated with ancillary physiographic data in a raster geographic information system. Spatial analysis of these data revealed that urban land uses increased from 6.7% of the landscape in 1968 to 17.8% in 1985, resulting in an expansion in urban land area that was eight times faster than the increase in population. The number of urban patches, or contiguous urban areas, decreased from 936 to 829, although the average size of the urban patches increased from 9.4 to 25.4 ha. The majority of the new urban land was residential development located between 3 and 25 km from the central business districts of the villages and cities within the landscape. Spatially dispersed urban development generates incremental landscape changes that typically contribute to environmental degradation. Land use policies designed to protect environmental quality in urbanizing landscapes should focus, therefore, on accomplishing at least three objectives: (1) minimize further fragmentation of the ecological infrastructure;(2) restore, where practical, severed linkages in the ecological infrastructure; and (3) guide new development to locations near existing urban centers. If any of these objectives are to be met in the adversarial legal and political milieu of the USA, policy makers must devise land use controls that do not constitute a `taking' of private property. This paper argues that effective rural land use controls will not be widely implemented, or successfully withstand legal challenges, until empirical research demonstrates that land use spatial patterns directly affect both environmental quality and human quality of life, and that unregulated land markets in urbanizing landscapes encourage land use changes that inevitably degrade environmental quality. |
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