Land Development System Research Articles

Urban densification and sustainable mobility in a post-socialist city. Reconstruction of the science and business district development in Gdańsk

The transport land-use nexus lies at the core of the scientific debate on sustainable mobility. Researchers' insights suggest that densification can lead to better accessibility by reducing travel needs and distances, thus changing the modal split. However, lack of consistent transport policies, that accompany densification, can have side effects: increased congestion and pollution. Although analyses of the interaction between urban intensification and transportation planning have been conducted before, there is still a lack of knowledge of the form of that interaction in post-socialist cities. The process of emergence of the science and business district in Gdansk - a large, post-socialist city in Central Europe – provides an instructive subject for the analysis of this interaction. Descriptive and visual reconstruction of the land development and transport system performance, along with the analysis of strategic and planning documents, reveal inconsistencies in local policy and barriers to its implementation. A set of factors identified in the research indicates that the implementation of the accessibility and mobility strategies are deficient, leading to the disturbance of the balanced cycle model. On the one hand, these factors preserve an unfavourable modal split, but on the other hand, they may trigger bottom-up reactions and market initiatives.

Evaluation of Equity in Informal Land Development Systems in Two Nigerian Cities

Abstract The informal land development system in sub-Saharan Africa is perceived to promote equity and could be leveraged to support sustainable urban development and management. However, scanty em...

Smart plot division: generating a plot-based strategy for the restoration of the old south historic urban area in Nanjing

China’s historic cities have experienced drastic transformations since the socialist revolution of 1949. One essential change in this regard is the reconstruction of the prevalent land plot pattern; the historic plot pattern has been heavily damaged by constant urban renewals, as oversized plots, deriving from amalgamation of previous small plots, have become a prominent feature of contemporary historic urban areas. The damage to the historic plot pattern has shown that the current plot division mechanism does not support the conservation of historic cities. Taking Nanjing’s old south area as an example, this research analyses the changes in and problems with the plot division mechanism since 1949 and its impact on urban forms. Changes in the plot division mechanism show that megaplots have been a constant in the ever-changing land development system since 1949, leading to elimination of historic land subdivisions and to inefficient regulatory planning with limited affordances. In this sense, it is necessary to establish a set of smart plot division strategies to promote the restoration of this historic urban area. The essence of the strategy proposed here involves five patterns of plot division, corresponding to different land development requirements and morphological zones.

Impacts of Informal Settlements on Housing Development: The Case of Debre Berhan Town, Amhara Regional State, Ethiopia

The issue of inadequate housing is the difficulty that millions of lower and middle-income groups in urban areas of the developing world face. This study is an assessment of informal settlements and its impacts on housing developments in Debre Berhan town. The core problem identified in this research is the uncontrollable illegal division of lands for substandard housing. The study aimed to examine the characteristics informal settlements focusing on housing standards, causes of Informal settlements including their impacts in the housing developments, the different modes of informal land acquisition mechanisms, evaluating the legal responses for informal settlers to solve these impacts and to propose a possible preventive and curative solution for the informal settlement expansion in the town. The research design employed in the study was a mixed type and the combination of probability and purposive sampling techniques were used. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from primary and secondary sources, and the methods of data collection from primary were direct observation, interviews, field questionnaire surveys, and instrumental use. The result of the study of informal settlements in the town was characterized by legal, socioeconomic, and environment due to the inefficiency of the formal land supply process, to deliver adequate land for housing, population growth, urbanization, socio-cultural factors, and others. And the major mechanisms of informal land acquired through purchasing lands from informal land market and inheritance. The physical, social, political, and environmental problems were the impacts that are caused by informal settlements and the local government’s response was regulating and demolition. The study recommended the entire land development and management system to address vital areas of strategic physical planning, cadastral surveying, land recording and registration, and well-managed land information system to improve the land availability factor in the town and help to control informal settlements. This research will have a positive contribution to promoting the realization of the right to adequate housing with security of tenure for informal settlements in Debre Berhan town.

Low Cost Mass Urban Housing in India: Hurdles and Options

It is disappointing to note that pathetic Slum settlements meet the housing needs of a substantial urban population in large metro cities in countries like India. They have grown beyond management due to widespread poverty, rising prices of accommodation and inadequate housing bank loan and land development systems. Governments have failed miserably in controlling these slums although they have tried to provide alternative settlements. Yet the problems continue. The solution lies in providing affordable and sustainable solutions. This paper discusses the current status of low-cost low-income mass housing in India based on interaction with applicants of LIG and EWS housing projects. The banks and financial institutions do not provide finance to the people from the informal sector and those having no permanent source of income. There is a need to create some solution to this problem.

Thinking outside the box and introducing land readjustment against the conventional urban land acquisition and delivery method in Ethiopia

The conventional and state controlled expropriation is the sole urban land acquisition method for housing and other urban development purposes in Ethiopia. Transitional peri-urban areas are those places where state controlled expropriation measures are largely executed as a response to the growing land and housing demands induced by rapid urbanization. Thus, the aim of this study is to review the deficiencies associated with the existing urban land acquisition and delivery method with a view of arriving at an alternative means of mitigating the challenges associated with it. A mixture of desk review and case study approaches were employed to achieve the objective of the study. The findings of the study shows that the urban land acquisition strategy employed by the government has been exerting unnecessary pressure on peri-urban land and it is also largely criticized for inducing displacement and disruption to the local farming peri-urban communities. The challenges seen in the peri-urban areas stipulate policy makers and researchers and other stakeholders to think outside the box and bring alternative solutions for it. In line with this, the reviews of international experiences on urbanization and associated growing demand of land, land readjustment has largely been implemented as alternative and emerging land acquisition and delivery tool. Therefore, government led land readjustment is recommended to be introduced in the Ethiopian urban land development system as a mechanism to revert the unpleasant urban development practices and trends seen in the peri-urban areas of Ethiopia.

Assessing the impacts of the land development system on land prices in Vietnam’s metropolises

Assessing the impacts of the land development system on land prices in Vietnam’s metropolises

Location Affordability and Regional Economic Resilience: Evidence from the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis

The form and function of cities is in large part defined by the interrelationship between land development and transportation systems. This relationship has important implications for households, including how it shapes economic costs for housing and transportation. Understanding these cost burdens is relevant for transportation agencies that are developing policies, plans, and programs with the intent of improving affordability. This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between high housing cost burdens, high levels of vehicle ownership, demographic characteristics, and mortgage foreclosure. Using data from before the recent U.S. economic crisis, the analysis estimates the effects of pre-crisis characteristics of census tracts and metropolitan regions on foreclosure rates. Multi-dimensional measures of urban form are included to evaluate the effect of metro-level characteristics. The models indicate high shares of Black homeowners, high shares of Hispanic homeowners, and lower income levels are associated with increased foreclosure. Also important is the share of households with high housing cost burdens. High shares of households with high vehicle ownership levels are significantly and positively associated with default and foreclosure. This suggests the costs associated with the ownership of multiple vehicles contributed to households’ economic vulnerability, a vulnerability revealed by mortgage foreclosures. The results for the urban form factors are mixed. Although increased compactness of jobs and housing has a negative effect on foreclosure, increased development intensity across the entire metro region has a positive effect. These differential effects challenge broad-brush assertions of negative impacts of urban sprawl.

Comparison of the impacts of non-negotiable and negotiable developer obligations in Turkey

Due to financing limitations, city governments increasingly rely upon private sector finance to support the supply of social and technical infrastructure. Accordingly, developer obligations have become increasingly important in urban planning and in land and property development. Compared to the numbers of previous studies related to ‘non-negotiable developer obligations’ (N-NDOs), the studies related to ‘negotiable developer obligations’ (NDOs) are much more limited. Also, there is a lack of studies comparing their respective impacts. The aim of this article is to compare the impacts of N-NDOs and NDOs within the specific country context of Turkey. The findings of study demonstrate that efficiency of N-NDOs and NDOs is closely related to the balance between certainty and flexibility in planning and land development system, the degree of transparency and the level of accountability, and value capture capacity.

Informal Land Development on the Urban Fringe

Urban fringes are an important part of urban growth. In addition to formal land markets, a variety of informal land development methods make urban fringes the most dynamic and complicated areas. The analysis of land transfer and development systems in these areas opens a significant window to understanding the modern processes of urbanization and human and property rights in urban areas in China. This study uses Shanghai as a case study target and identifies specific modes of local land development and investigates how collective participants, government agencies, regulatory policies, and various actors are involved in land development and decision making. The in-depth analysis and case studies indicate that the variety of informal land markets in Shanghai reflects the inherent demands of the market for allocation of land resources within the constraints of the given system and against the given development background. However, conflicts between the mode of the market and the existing institutional constraints reflect the uncoordinated development of the land and the economic and social development around the urban fringe. The empirical results of this paper suggest that government administration should improve the land market system, strengthen the planning of control and guidance, rationalize the distribution of interests in land development, and strengthen the supervision of management of land development enterprises. Instead of fragmented aspects, this paper proposes a systematic analytical approach to understanding the informal land development in a city from an urban planning and land resource management perspective.

The origins of the Bamiléké hedgescape “bocage”. Development from 1900 to 1960

This paper analyses the evolution of the Bamileke bocage (hedgescape) between 1900 and 1960. The process was nonlinear and consisted in waves of extension and withdrawal resulting from farmers’ innovations and foreign influences. We distinguish four time periods, which we feel correspond to evolutionary phases of the wooded landscapes: the arrival of the Europeans (1900-1915), the period from European pacification to the liberalisation of the coffee trade (1915 to 1945), the period of liberalised coffee trade (1945 to 1960), and the period of havoc at the time of independence (around 1960). At the beginning of the 20th century, clusters of hedgerows were all that remained in the mainly savannah landscape around settlements. Between 1915 and 1945, the hedgerow system quickly spread and dominated the landscape. The Bamileke region appeared to have crossed a demographic threshold that required a more intense land development system with a more developed bocage. Coffee production, which was introduced by the French, provided the farmers with an alternative cash crop. The best lands were used to grow coffee, not to rear livestock, formerly the traditional source of income. The enclosure system was gradually abandoned, with hedges used mainly to delineate allocated lands and as a source of wood and non-wood forest products. After 1945, the system continued to expand in the colonised areas. But it later shrank in areas where conflict broke out in the early days of independence. It later again expanded, but sometimes in a modified form.

Soil impact and radiation dose to native plants in forest ecosystem

A radiation dose assessment model was applied to determine naturally occurring radionuclides 238U, 210Po and 232Th in trees like Elaeocarpus oblongus, Evodia roxburghiana (Juice of the leaves that are used to treat fever), Vaccinium neilgherrense, Viburnum hebanthum and Michelia nilagirica and shrubs like Lasianthus coffeoiaes and Hedyotis stylosa in the agroforests of the Western Ghats, India and these areas were used for different agroforestry models of land development systems. The concentration of radionuclides in the biota and corresponding soil was measured using a gamma ray spectrometer and an alpha counter. The concentration ratios of these radionuclides varied substantially between the species, and E. oblongus showed a preferential uptake of all the radionuclides and hence useful for bio-indication of radionuclides in such soils. ERICA assessment tool was employed to provide an assessment of the potential doses to biota’s growing in agro forest E. oblongus appears to be much prone to radiation absorption from the dose risk point of view. The annual effective dose (AED) due to ingestion of these radionuclides in E. roxburghiana was also estimated, and was found to be lower than the world average.

Modes of land development in Shanghai

Land development modelling and simulation provides critical information and insights for city land resource planning and management. However, studies on simulating urban land development often treat it as a singular and uniform process and neglect place-based decision-making processes and multiple tracks of how urban land is developed. This study attempts to identify the locally embedded, place-based processes of land conversion and redevelopment during the reform period in Shanghai. In doing so, this study conducts in-depth interviews and collects extensive land use and planning data to examine the land development decision-making processes of the city. In conjunction with the content analysis of government documents and urban planning results, this study proposes to frame the current land development of Shanghai into State-led Market-based Land Development, Informal Land Development, State-led Land Redevelopment, State-approved Independent Development, and Megaproject-based Land Development, according to land use types, property rights, and intermediate agencies. By comparing urban planning and actual land use change data, the study delineates the location and estimate magnitude of each of the land development modes in Shanghai. Different from market-based land development systems, the results show that the state interventions in the land market has been prevalent to create a unique government-led land development system with multiple approaches and land use change trajectories in Shanghai. The result explains why current land development modelling and simulation cannot mimic the actual land development process properly. Furthermore, the study provides the empirical basis for new theorization of land development in China.

Cadastral Systems Re-engineering in Urban Zimbabwe

Land is undoubtedly the most important resource in any country as it contributes to economic development. The cadastre is a component of the land administration system (LAS) that is crucial for managing land. It is thus of importance for a nation to have both a functional cadastral system for determining parcel boundaries and a functional cadastral information system, for managing the land parcels. The cadastral survey system and cadastre in Zimbabwe are largely manual with even the lodgement of completed surveys for examination and approval still analogue. This has an impact on the time it takes to complete a land transaction. Land can ideally drive the economy yet part of the value is lost due to lengthy land transaction procedures. The land administration system is supposed to consist of value adding processes in which several actors interact in a workflow which creates new or transfers parcels. This workflow is associated with transaction costs, part of which can be employed for maintenance of the cadastral information system. This article presents business processes for the land development process in Zimbabwe but focusing on City of Gweru (CoG) and City of Mutare (CoM) municipalities as the major organisations under study. Municipalities in Zimbabwe are governed by the Regional Town and Country Planning Act, so such a single process and workflow model can fit into the cadastral information system of all municipalities in Zimbabwe with insignificant changes. The broader scope of this study is towards the design of a conceptual schema for automating the land administration system and particularly, the cadastre component, for municipalities in Zimbabwe. This study presents the workflows for the current land development system with CoG and CoM as the current focal points. Information on current automation efforts or reforms by other major municipalities to include Bulawayo, Kadoma and Kariba is also presented. The overall theme of this paper is to discuss cadastral reform through automation of cadastral processes in municipalities.

Land readjustment as an alternative land development tool for peri-urban areas of Ethiopia

Purpose– The rapid urban population growth in Ethiopia is causing an increasing demand for urban land, which primarily tends to be supplied by expropriation of peri-urban land. The process of urban development in Ethiopia is largely criticized for forced displacement and disruption of the peri-urban local community. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to introduce how Ethiopia’s urban development system could be built on the participatory and inclusive approaches of land acquisition.Design/methodology/approach– The study has employed questionnaire survey results, focus group discussion with panel of experts and previous research reports to examine the peri-urban situations and then to show why an alternative land development approach is needed to be introduced in the urban land development system of Ethiopia. Desk review on land readjustment was also made to explore best lessons from other countries applicable to the peri-urban contexts of Ethiopia.Findings– This study has explored that land readjustment is potentially an appropriate land development tool to alleviate peri-urban land development limitations in Ethiopia.Practical implications– Researchers, policy makers and government bodies that are interested in peri-urban land would appreciate and consider implementing the adapted land readjustment model as an alternative land development tool. Consequently, the local peri-urban landholders’ rights would be protected and maintained in the process of urbanization.Originality/value– Although land readjustment has the potential to achieve participatory peri-urban land development, awareness of the method in the Ethiopian urban land development system is inadequate. This study contributes to fill this gap and create an insight into the basic conditions for the adaption of the tool.

Health and transportation: Small scale area association

Public health, as a major factor influencing the livability and well-being of a community has been a subject of interest in many academic fields. It is postulated that public health has strong correlations with various factors including land development, urban form, and transportation system elements. However, due to scarcity of individual level and confidential health data, such analysis has been typically conducted in an aggregate level resulting in less accurate results due to aggregation bias. In this paper, a methodology is developed and applied to disaggregate an individual-level health data in county scale into smaller geography by using an iterative proportional fitting approach while maintaining the marginal distributions of the controlled variables. Then, the disaggregated data is used to estimate various models of individual health condition as a function of socio-demographic, built environment, and transportation system attributes. It is noteworthy that the proposed approach can be applied to disaggregate any aggregate data in an efficient way.

Premises For Buildng A Land Bank By Developers

Abstract In a development project, land is the key factor of production. The concepts of its identification, selection and development are fundamental to the pre-investment phase. The purpose of the article is to present a definition of a land bank and identify the factors which have an impact on creating land banks by developers. If the length of time between the actual acquisition of land and the commencement of construction work is difficult to predict, developers will increase the size of their land banks. The author assumes that one of the most important premises for developers to accumulate land resources is the land development system which creates land availability.

Spatial Information for Sustainable Land Resources Development: Using Technology for Informed Decision Making

With high urbanization and weak financial bases, Local Governments in Nigeria are struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of change. Despite commitment to sustainable development by the Nigeria government, poor or inappropriate data management practices have posed constraints towards realization of its set goals. The potential for digital data technology is therefore being recognized by many government and local authority managers as a necessary aid to informed decision making during planning and delivery of services. However, it is common practice for spatial data within the same authority to be stored in formats not conducive to their effective use as a common resource and information being withheld unnecessarily from other users. With reference to Katsina, this paper draws on Nigeria's relatively well developed cadastre system to explore how a cadastre-based Land development system can be developed for easy identification of properties and their owners/occupiers; and the formation, and implementation of databases to facilitate efficient processing and dissemination of spatial data for sustainable management of Land resources. Despite the initial high cost of implementing a Geographic Information System, and although it might be argued that the circumstances are different, the paper draws parallels with the initial land registration process in Nigeria whose records are still being use by government through data sales many decades later and argues for its (GIS) implementation. The paper focuses on providing technical solutions for better spatial data management as they relate management and delivery of Land resources services in Katsina.

국토계획법에 의한 농촌 토지 이용관리의 실효성 평가

In 2003, The National Land Use and Planning (NLUP Act) was enacted unifying two old laws; The Urban Planning enacted in 1962 and The National Land Use and Management enacted in 1972. One of main reasons of unifying two acts was to extend urban planning-based development systems to rural areas for preventing uncontrolled urban sprawl in rural areas and enhancing or settlling plan-based land use system in rural areas. This paper is conducted with the following specific objectives: i) to critically review the contents of NLUP Act in terms of rational rural land use planning; ii) to evaluate plan-based land use practices in rural area by NLUP Act; iii) to appraise performance level for prevention against unplanned development activities in rural areas by NLUP Act. To accomplish these objectives, we surveyed actural state of rural land use and development system by the new act in two case study areas. Ansung city in Gyeongi province as an urban sprawl region and Hamyang county in Gyeongnam Province as a remote rural area. Study results ascertained that the new act can not effectively control rural land use and not prevent over-use of agricultural land in the positive and effective ways because of followering three points.

AN APPROACH TO SUSTAINABLE LOW-INCOME HOUSING

Squatter settlements providing housing to 30-70% of the population in many urban centres in the developing countries have grown due to widespread poverty, and inadequate housing finance and land development systems. Governments assisted by the international agencies have improved environment, tenure security, income and resources in many settlements, but could not eradicate the problems as outcome did not multiply into overall development due to lack in institutional development, policy implementation, governance, participation etc. Because the problem was enormous which the government could not overcome, enablement was advocated to sustain long-term solutions. On the other hand past growing developing world cities are facing environmental problems; coupled with low level of economic and social development, which in turn is threatening sustainable development in cities. This paper argues that the spontaneous settlements in informal sector have more positive attributes in terms of social, economic and environmental sustainability as compared to dominant public housing approach. This paper further discusses the changing approaches to the issues of low-income housing worldwide in the above context, and examines the issues related to sustainable housing. Keywords: Housing Policy, Self-Help, Sites-and-Services, Squatter Settlement, Sustainability, World Bank.