Land-Use Changes in the Rural-Urban Fringe

Abstract

Land use in the rural-urban fringe is regulated by two zoning acts: the first is the Urban Planning Act, which is intended to divide urban planning area into an urbanization promotion area and an urbanization control area in order to restrict urban sprawl; the second is the Agriculture Promotion Act, which is intended to define agriculture promotion area within the urbanization control area in order to protect and promote agriculture by a strict management of land-use conversions. It is often said that these zoning acts have not achieved expected results. However, there have not been sufficient attempts to examine their achievements quantitatively. The aim of this paper is to establish quantitatively the patterns of land-use changes in the two contrasting zones of the rural-urban fringe, i. e. the urbanization promotion area and the urbanization control area, for an actual case.The area selected, which is about 20 square kilometers in size, occupies the southern part of Matsuzama City, and it is facing a hasty urbanization, with a rapid increase of population and large-scale land-use changes. This area includes both types of zone, i. e. an urbanization promotion area and an urbanization control area (including an agriculture promotion area). The author measured land-use changes in each zone on the land-use maps of 1971 and 1976 compiled by Matsuyama city office on a scale of 1 to 10, 000.The results of the investigation are as follows:(1) In the urbanization promotion area and the urbanization control area, land-use changes from rural (paddyfield, upland field, forest) to urban categories (housing, business and commerce, industry etc.) exceeded other types of change, and they amounted to sixty percent of the total land-use changes.(2) The diversification of land use during this period was shown in terms of the increase in the number of land uses extracted by Doi's method of land-use combination.(3) The area of land-use changes in the urbanization control area was about one third of that in the urbanization promotion area, but it still amounted to 3.5 percent of the former area. This means that although the zoning by the Urban Planning Act played certain role in the management of urban sprawl, it fell short of its original target.(4) In the urbanization promotion area, land-use changes between urban categories was about three times as much as in the urbanization control area, reflecting looser legal restrictions on these changes in the former. Land-use changes from rural to transitional categories (vacant land) were more evident in the urbanization control area, because large-scale projects, which were accompanied by many vacant lands during contstruction, were apt to be located in the urbanization control area.(5) In the urbanization promotion area, land-use changes were disorderly throughout the whole area, because land-use conversion was almost free in this area. On the other hand, land-use conversions were mainly located along trunk roads in the urbanization control area, due to the legal guidelines on the conversion of agricultual land.It may be concluded that there were clearly different patterns of land-use changes between the urbanization promotion area and the urbanization control area, and the zoning acts regulated patterns of conversion to some extent in the rural-urban fringe.