Land Use

views updated

Land Use

Land-use conflicts, planning, and regulation

Land use is a geographical concept that refers to the ways in which parcels of land are utilized by people and society. Land use planning is an activity that examines the factors that influence the nature and dynamics of land usage and develops ways to optimize those variables to achieve larger social, economic, and ecological benefits.

Uses of the land

Land can be used in different ways. These can include residential, institutional, business, industrial, agricultural, forestry, park, and other relatively natural land uses. Each of these broader categories can be further subdivided based on the nature and intensity of the activities that are undertaken.

Residential land use, for example, can involve single-family dwellings on large or small lots, or aggregations of multiple-unit dwellings of various sorts. The most intensive residential land-uses are associated with clusters of apartment buildings, which can support high densities of human population.

Institutional land uses are mostly associated with land that is occupied by public buildings such as schools, universities, government office buildings, art galleries, and museums. These facilities are most commonly located in urban or suburban areas. Business land uses are similar in many respects, and are mostly associated with land that is appropriated to retail facilities of various types, and with office buildings.

Industrial land uses are extremely varied, depending on the nature of the industry being considered. Urban-industrial land usage generally refers to the siting of factories or petroleum refineries, and of utilities such as electricity generating stations, and water-and sewage-treatment facilities. Industrial land use in rural areas can include mines, smelters, and mills for the production of ores and metals; mines and well fields for the production of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas; and large water-holding reservoirs for the production of hydroelectricity.

Land uses for agriculture and forestry are also types of industrial land uses, in this case involved with the production of food or tree-fiber as renewable resources. The nature of agricultural land uses depends on the types of crops and agronomic systems, which can vary from intensively managed monocultures, to more organic systems involving annual or perennial crops and little use of fertilizers or pesticides. Similarly, the intensity of land use in forestry varies from systems involving clear-cutting and the establishment of short-rotation plantations, to selection-harvesting systems with long-spaced interventions.

Some land uses associated with parks and golf courses also represent intensive modifications of the natural landscape. The management practices required to maintain these lawn-dominated ecosystems are similar to those utilized in some types of monocultural agricultural systems. Other types of parks, however, are little changed from the natural state of the land, and they may only involve the development of access roads, unpaved trails, and interpretation facilities.

The last major category of land use involves designation of an area as an ecological or wilderness reserve. In most cases, this sort of land-use designation precludes the exploitation of natural resources by mining, forestry, or agriculture, and usually by hunting and fishing as well. However, scientific research and recreational activities that do not require extensive facilities, such as hiking and canoeing, may be permitted in many areas designated for natural land use.

Land-use conflicts, planning, and regulation

Land-use planning is an important activity of many geographers and planners. Land-use planning is usually pursued at the larger spatial scale, for example, by local or regional municipalities, counties, and states or provinces. The goal of land-use planning is to ensure that uses of the land are appropriate and sustainable, and do not cause unacceptable social or economic disruptions, or serious environmental degradations of the site or landscape. Land-use planning cannot achieve this goal by itself. There must also be a political will to implement appropriate land-use plans through regulation and zoning of the activities of people, businesses, and government itself. Achievement of a successful and sustainable pattern of land use requires planning, regulation, and monitoring, as well as effective resolution of unanticipated conflicts as they arise.

One of the most useful tools available to land-use planners is known as geographic information systems, or GIS. GIS is a computer-based system for the storage, retrieval, analysis, and portrayal of data on the uses, characteristics, and ecological dynamics of areas of land. Examples of spatial information that GIS is extremely useful in analyzing, portraying, and overlaying include data on topography, landforms, geologic hazards such as landslides or earthquake fault zones, surface waters, environmental chemistry, wild-life populations, ecological communities, floodplains, political boundaries, etc. Because of its powerful capabilities, GIS has proven to be a useful tool for planners, who can use this computerized system to describe both existing and future land-use characteristics, and to effectively model the potential implications of various land-use scenarios.

Urban and suburban land-use planning generally focuses on designing an appropriate mixture of residential, retail, business, institutional, industrial, and recreational land uses and activities. Attention must be paid to the delivery of utilities such as water, electricity, telephone lines, and sewerage services to all of these user groups, while also ensuring that there is an appropriate network of transportation facilities, and that unacceptable conflicts do not occur among user groups.

Many cities and larger urban-suburban regions have developed without paying appropriate attention to planning and regulating the various sorts of uses of the land, and problems have subsequently occurred. These predicaments include such problems as large numbers of people living beside heavily polluting industries, traffic jams due to little coordination of the development of residential facilities and employment opportunities, and large numbers of people having inadequate access to clean water and other elements of a healthy life-support system.

Land-use planning in rural areas must also focus on identifying and avoiding unacceptable environmental damages and conflicts among resource users. For example, in planning agricultural land use, it is critical to consider land capability and whether particular agricultural systems might cause excessive erosion, resulting in degradation of the agricultural resource, and unacceptable damage to nearby aquatic ecosystems.

Land used for agriculture, forestry, hydroelectric reservoirs, or mining is not available for other uses, and this can have great implications for regional economies and their sustainability. Therefore, wherever possible, it is desirable to have a balanced mixture of appropriate land-uses and activities on the landscape.

It is also critical that rural land-use planning accommodate the need to preserve some areas as natural, self-maintaining ecosystems, so that unacceptable

KEY TERMS

Geographic information systems (GIS) —A computer-based system for the storage, analysis, and portrayal of spatial data related to geography, ecology, and environmental science.

Landscape —An extensive area of terrain, encompassing many discrete ecological communities.

damages to biodiversity resources are not caused. This is also a consideration in urban land-use planning, although the opportunities to accommodate natural, ecological values are more limited in urban areas.