Abstract
Landscape corridor planning (LCP) has become a widespread practice for promoting sustainable regional development. This highly complex planning process covers many policy and planning issues concerning the local landscape, and ideally involves the people who live in the area to be developed. In China, regional planners and administrators encourage the development of landscape corridor planning. However, the current LCP process rarely considers ideas from local residents, and public participation is not recognized as beneficial to planning outcomes. We use a specific Chinese case of LCP to analyze how citizen involvement may enrich sustainable spatial planning in respect to ideas considered and solutions developed. To this end, we compare a recently approved landscape corridor plan that was created without public participation with alternative solutions for the same landscape corridor, developed with the involvement of local residents. These alternatives were then evaluated by professional planners who had been involved in the initial planning process. We demonstrate concrete differences between planning solutions developed with and without public participation. Further, we show that collaborative processes can minimize spatial conflicts. Finally, we demonstrate that public participation does indeed contribute to innovations that could enrich the corridor plan that had been produced exclusively by the decision-makers. The paper closes with a discussion of difficulties that might accompany the involvement of local residents during sustainable LCP in China.
Highlights
Landscape corridor planning (LCP) has become a widespread practice in recent decades, partly driven by a collective shift toward protecting against fragmentation caused by infrastructure and other urban and agricultural development, and partly as a way to promote regional sustainable development and to enhance ecological and cultural values
Based on our analysis of the current plan, a two-step framework was designed to study the potential enrichments that could be gained by including local resident participation in building the final plan: (1) Exploring the conflict area through different development preferences between local residents and decision-makers; and (2) Assessing alternative future development through scenario planning
Over the course of our study, we found that the existing gap between the differing views and education levels of our professional respondents, local decision-makers, and local residents contributed to the difficulties of involving the general population during landscape corridor planning in China
Summary
Landscape corridor planning (LCP) has become a widespread practice in recent decades, partly driven by a collective shift toward protecting against fragmentation caused by infrastructure and other urban and agricultural development, and partly as a way to promote regional sustainable development and to enhance ecological and cultural values. LCP typically includes traditional approaches to landscape planning including surveys and an analysis of spatial patterns, functions, and changes, combined with various forms of stakeholder involvement in the plan-making process [1]. Throughout the paper, LCP is understood to be a form of spatial planning through which future developments of the landscape corridor in question are both envisioned and controlled through different measures. “greenways” [2], are linear patterns that provide connectivity across landscapes and regions and are subject to public spatial planning processes. Whereas early approaches to landscape corridor planning were based almost exclusively on landscape analysis and judgements made by planning experts [5,6], these planning processes have become common practice in many countries
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