Prospects for the Rural‐Urban Fringe in Australia: Observations from a Brief History of the Landscapes around Sydney and Adelaide

Despite being a major site of recent population growth and, arguably, a key arena for sustainability concerns, the rural‐urban fringe has received relatively little attention in the literature concerning Australian cities and urban policy. To address this shortcoming the authors review post‐World War II efforts to plan the rural‐urban fringes of Sydney and Adelaide and find a number of issues for contemporary policy‐makers. First, the fringe is becoming increasingly complex due to multi‐faceted demographic change, a broadening economic base and demands for better environmental management, all within the context of an evolving understanding of sustainability. Second, water resource management, partly under the auspices of integrated natural resource management, is assuming a much higher priority than in early fringe planning endeavours, which emphasised urban containment, agricultural land protection and landscape conservation. Third, and partly as a consequence of this shift of priorities, there is also evidence of changes to the nature and focus of policy tools used in the fringe, with land management concerns now cutting across traditional land use planning. Finally, and fundamentally, these observations raise questions about how future governance of the fringe should be organised. Together these four themes pose an enthralling series of challenges for policy‐makers for which much more research and discussion are needed.     

Measurement of Urban Fringe Sprawl in Nanjing between 1984 and 2010 Using Multidimensional Indicators

Due to the global increases in urbanisation rates, urban sprawl has become a worldwide issue. In China, the development of rural areas has been affected by urban expansion and adjustments of metropolitan areas by administrative divisions that have led to losses in agricultural lands and ecosystem services. There is the ‘paradoxical’ desire for governments to promote rural development and protect land resources. Urban fringe sprawl is a prominent issue in the process of rural development. Identifying and measuring sprawl at the urban fringe could assist policymakers to either encourage or discourage this phenomenon. This paper demonstrates use of multidimensional indicators to effectively measure urban fringe sprawl by remote sensing, in addition to demographic and socio‐economic data. Using integrated indicators observed in the recent Chinese development context, urban fringe sprawl was measured comprehensively for Jiangning, a district in the city of Nanjing, China. This study indicates that Jiangning is sprawling rapidly. The results also show that the multidimensional indicator approach could provide decision support to create effective long‐term land‐use planning policies for controlling urban sprawl patterns.     

Agricultural Adaptation to Real Regulation on the Urban Fringe: The Chicken Meat Industry's Response to Land‐use Conflict in the Western Port Region of Victoria,Australia

Research theorising the rural‐urban fringe has not focussed in detail on the regulatory system managing land‐use conflict, including disputes arising between agricultural enterprises and residential property owners. To explore local forms of regulation the need to identify relevant actors, their interrelationships and the way that they compete to influence decision‐makers is widely recognised in the literature. Moran et al.'s (1996) conceptualisation of ‘real regulation’, with its emphasis on lobbying by social actors and the (re)formulation of legislation, is identified as a theoretical perspective that can help to explain local forms of regulation. The understanding of patterns of regulation on the urban fringe requires a more detailed conceptualisation of non‐legislative forms of policy, and a greater appreciation of the different strategies adopted by farmers to influence government. This paper investigates how urban fringe agricultural industries have attempted to influence decision‐making within the development approval process. Evidence is presented from the Western Port region in the urban fringe of Melbourne, Victoria, where refusal for the construction of broiler sheds by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has resulted in the chicken meat industry adopting a more scientific siting strategy. It is concluded that, whilst this provides an example of agricultural adaptation and reinforces the importance of adopting a temporal dimension to investigate the land development process, the possibility that government will assess environmental harm differently in the future leaves urban fringe broiler farming in a precarious position.     

SHADOWS OF PLANNING: ON LANDSCAPE/PLANNING HISTORY AND INHERITED LANDSCAPE AMBIGUITIES AT THE URBAN FRINGE

The history of vernacular landscapes at the urban fringe is poorly studied, limiting our understanding of the contemporary character of the fringe and our knowledge of the urbanization process. This article argues the necessity of a combined analysis of the legacies of planning and the footprints of former landscape ideals in order to understand the conditions for spatial planning at the urban fringe. After first introducing the methodological use of landscape/planning history, the article focuses on the Swedish discourse on landscape change and landscape planning concerning the urban fringe in the 1930s. Particular focus is placed on the discourse on agricultural landscapes at the urban fringe. The third section of the article presents an examination of the footprints of the ‘landscape convention’ (i.e. an agreement on the meaning of landscape in relation to law and justice) resulting from the landscape discourse of the 1930s. The article argues that the legacy of the 1930s explains some of the difficulties arising when planners of today aim to utilize the farm landscape as a resource for recreation at the urban fringe. The shadow of the landscape discourse of the 1930s also creates difficulties in dealing with peri‐urban landscapes in Swedish planning and Swedish law. With the ongoing discourse on how to implement the European Landscape Convention, such knowledge is particularly useful.     

Policy Instrument Choices for Growth Management and Land Use Regulation

What factors account for local government land use practices and their choices among specific growth management policy instruments? We apply the political market framework to examine how land use policy choices in Florida are shaped by institutional features of county governments and the demands of organizations and interests in a community. Local policy decisions reflect a balance of the conflicting interests and responses to economic and political pressures. The results demonstrate that county government structure and election rules play critical roles in the adoption of urban service boundaries, incentive zoning, and transfer of development rights programs. We report evidence consistent with the argument that these “second‐generation” growth management policies are motivated by exclusionary goals.     

中国大城市边缘区的概念辨析及其划分

城市边缘区是城市化的前沿地区,是城乡作用力交织碰撞的地域空间,对它的概念描述及划分因城乡发展的背景各异以及研究角度的差异而不同。本文回顾了国内外城市边缘区概念的发展,比较了我国描述城市边缘地带的几个概念之间的差异及其使用范围,针对当前国情,提出了突出地域空间、土地、社会、经济方面特征的城市边缘区概念;结合常用的划分边缘区的几种方法,以武汉市为例,提出从城市规划角度划分边缘区的主要原则及其方法。     

Class,Community and Communicative Planning: Urban Redevelopment at King's Cross,London

Abstract: This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class‐ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”‐based rather than in class‐sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.     

LANDSCAPES OUT OF ORDER: STUDYING THE INNER URBAN FRINGE BEYOND THE RURAL – URBAN DIVIDE

Contemporary accounts of the inner urban fringe tend to focus on the transition from rural to urban land use and rural–urban conflicts, rather than highlighting the landscape at the city edge in its own right. It is argued in this paper that such dichotomous accounts neglect the complexity, values and conflicts of fringe landscapes. The study illustrates that an investigation into the relationship between attempts within spatial planning to design orderly places for urban expansion and the evolvement of places out of order offers a way to analyse landscape transformations at the fringe beyond the rural–urban divide. This approach will offer a multifaceted analysis of the landscape, which in turn will facilitate a more open discussion on land use and values within planning. A theoretical discussion on the interplay between ordered and disordered places is followed by a case study of the interactions between a disordered place and the ambitions within spatial planning to create order. The study has been conducted at the fringe of Burlöv (in southernmost Sweden). By way of conclusion, the findings of the case study are summarized, along with arguments that underline the need for further case studies of fringe landscapes.     

Flexible urban governance. The case of Copenhagen's recent waterfront development

In this paper, the most recent wave of Copenhagen's waterfront development is analyzed and interpreted in the context of broader economic tendencies and political strategies. Recent events illuminate relationships among politicians, bureaucrats and capital to regulate an accumulation process that is highly intertwined with international, national as well as urban interests. Beginning in the late 1980s, the national state, the local state and the port authority, undertook a number of planning and policy initiatives to create a process for transforming Copenhagen's waterfront. When contradictions from the logic of profit maximization became apparent and threatened to de‐rail long term economic growth, a new ad hoc and ‘flexible’ process of urban governance was established to get development back on track. Senior politicians created a so‐called ‘Vision Group’ that functioned as a ‘meta‐steering’ committee providing direction to local development by identifying a development approach that attempted to resolve, at least temporarily, tensions among global market tendencies and the interests of the main actors. In this way, the Vision Group achieved its political purpose to create a shared vision and a discourse for the development of the waterfront. The new strategy was effective at various scales of governance, but circumvented local planning practices.     

试论大城市边缘区的成长机制

大城市边缘区的成长是一个复杂的发展过程。受多种因素的影响,其中经济发展是导致其变化最根本的决定性因素,而经济发展对边缘区成长的决定性影响是通过以下机制发生作用的:首先,城市化过程导致大城市边缘区各组成部分功能的变化,即大城市边缘区出现了新的功能或原有部分功能的衰退;其次,经济的波动,又增强了城市边缘区变化的幅度。     

西安城市边缘区空间扩展研究

城市边缘区是位于城市建成区与乡村地域之间受城市辐射深刻影响的过渡地带。文章采用"断裂点"法的基本原理和Matlab软件编制程序识别图像来运算城市边缘区范围,将西安城市边缘区的扩展划分为五个阶段,分析了各个阶段的扩展情况,以及各个阶段的扩展模式,最后对西安2020年城市边缘区范围进行了展望。     

城市边缘区生态隔离机制探讨

城市边缘区是城乡建设中最复杂、最富变化的地区,其土地利用兼具城市用地和乡村用地二重特性,目前已经形成的城市边缘区形态主要有:生态隔离区、公共绿地和游憩区、工业园区或经济开发区、农业用地、对外交通用地。本文分析了城市边缘区现状生态问题最主要的表现是区域生态环境的恶化和生态的失衡。在此基础上,提出城市边缘区生态隔离机制。     

Is culture-led redevelopment relevant for rural planners? The risk of adopting urban theories in rural settings

In the paper, the author argues that cultural strategies and theories about urban planning may be irrelevant or even counterproductive outside urban and suburban contexts. In many rural settings the problem is not the destruction of the cultural heritage or how to counterbalance the influence from corporate interests, but rather the absence of such interests in the first place. From a study of two rural municipalities in southern Norway, the author demonstrates that culture-led strategies may be more of a distraction than an instrument for creating economic growth. Measured by the common goals for rural development in Norway, the cultural strategy has only been a success in one of the cases, whereas in the other case ideas about culture-led redevelopment have not prevented economic and demographic decline. The author concludes that while culture can be instrumental in creating growth in rural municipalities, it might also hamper their development.     

WHEN AND HOW DOES COMMUTING TO CITIES INFLUENCE RURAL EMPLOYMENT GROWTH?

This paper estimates the influence that rural‐to‐urban commuting has on rural employment growth, and whether the strength and spatial reach of this effect depend on commuters’ levels of education. A main finding is that rural‐to‐urban commuting has a robust positive impact on rural employment growth in services and retail. There is no significant difference in how far these effects reach into rural Sweden for commuters with different levels of education. These results suggest that a viable policy for local employment growth in rural areas with reasonable commuting times to urban centers is to improve the commuting to urban centers.     

Community Volunteering as Neoliberal Strategy? Green Space Production in Berlin

Abstract: The task for critical urban research is to analyze processes of neoliberalization “on the ground”. This paper examines—based on original empirical research—in how far the outsourcing of former local state responsibilities for public services and urban infrastructure is expressed in the promotion of community gardening in Berlin (Germany). It shows the contradictory outcomes: on the one hand, a failing strategy of outsourcing towards residents and the opening up of opportunity structures for other interests. On the other hand it shows how far the emergence of open green spaces maintained by volunteers can only be understood against the background of “roll‐back” neoliberal urban politics and that their rationality cannot be separated from “roll‐out neoliberalism”.     

The Territorial Expansion of American Cities and their Population Growth

The significance of territorial expansion of American cities in the growth of their population from one census to another is analyzed. The number of cities making annexations during intercensal periods has been steadily increasing since World War II. The trend is particularly pronounced in the South and West because of intensive industrialization and, in the case of the West, in-migration. In the North, annexation is often blocked by the presence of incorporated places in the urban fringe surrounding the central city. Some Northern cities have in fact lost population in the 1950–1960 period despite an expansion of their city limits.     

Fishing Livelihoods,Seashore Tourism,and Industrial Development in Coastal Rio de Janeiro: Conflict,Multi‐Functionality,and Juxtaposition

Critical global political ecology and critical cultural political economy approaches are used in a study involving decades of research to evaluate the changing relationship between fisher livelihoods, seashore tourism, and urban industrial development in an economically dynamic region of coastal Brazil. As the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro expanded and encompassed fishing communities, socio‐environmental transformations created threats to fisher ways of life, opened new multi‐functional opportunities, and also introduced unrelated juxtaposed activities. As stocks fell due to overfishing and urban industrial pollution over the last two decades, small‐scale inshore fishing declined in the bay–lagoon systems located to the east and south‐west of Rio de Janeiro. Tourism increased but proved to be a poor substitute for declining fishing activities because it and other new multi‐functional activities rarely aggregated significant value to local livelihoods. Consequently, only a small minority of fishers benefited and remained on the islands and sand spits, while the great majority left for the mainland. New cultural and environmental functions were also absent, so that of the types of multi‐functionality identified by Wilson and Holmes, those present in the study area are weak and basically serve outside urban production and consumption interests.     

Government institutions and the dynamics of urban growth in China

Economic growth in China in recent decades has largely rested on the dynamism of its cities. High economic growth has coincided with measures aimed at improving the efficiency of local governments and with a mounting political drive to curb corruption. Yet the connection between government institutions and urban growth in China remains poorly understood. This paper is the first to look into the link between government efficiency and corruption, on the one hand, and urban growth in China, on the other hand and to assess what is the role of institutions relative to more traditional factors for economic growth in Chinese cities. Using panel data for 283 cities over the period between 2003 and 2014, the results show that the urban growth in China is a consequence of a combination of favorable human capital, innovation, density, local conditions, foreign direct investment, and city‐level government institutions. Both government quality—especially for those cities with the best governments—and the fight against corruption at the city level have a direct effect on urban growth. Measures to tackle corruption at the provincial level matter in a more indirect way, by raising or lowering the returns of other growth‐inducing factors.     

基于遥感的城市边缘区土地利用动态监测

城市边缘区在城市地域结构体系中处于城市与乡村的过渡地带,从而既属于生态环境脆弱带,又属于城市区域人文因素高度复合带,其时空特征表现出十分迅速和不稳定的特征。及时了解和掌握城市边缘区土地利用变化的状况,对于合理进行城市规划,调整用地结构,实现区域可持续发展具有十分重要的意义。本文以LandsatTM为基本信息源,以Coreldraw和ARC/INFO为主要支撑软件,完成了实验区从1987年到1996年的城市边缘区土地利用动态监测与分析。此技术路线能够有效地提取城市边缘区土地利用动态信息,工作周期短,误差积累少,定性定位准确率高     

EMERGENCE OF LEAPFROGGING FROM RESIDENTIAL CHOICE WITH ENDOGENOUS GREEN SPACE: ANALYTICAL RESULTS

Leapfrog development is a typical form of sprawl. This paper aims at analyzing the existence, size, and persistence of leapfrogging in a dynamic urban economic model with endogenous green amenities. We analyze whether incoming households choose to settle at the fringe of the city or to jump further away depending on their preferences and the structure of the city. We first provide an analytical treatment of the conditions and characteristics under which a first leapfrog occurs and show how the optimal choice is affected by the size of the city, income, commuting costs, as well as the size of the area where green amenities are considered. We then study how further leapfrogging and multiple urban rings may appear and be maintained in the long‐run equilibrium, and how infill processes take place through time.