Land Use Negotiations Research Articles

Reclaimed ecotones in the climate change era:A long-durée framing of urban expansion in Mumbai, Amsterdam, New York, and Tokyo

Transition ecologies, namely ecotones, are where life started. Deltas, estuaries, bayous, and wetlands are places where different ecosystems merge and evolutionary processes take place. This paper explores three time periods in four coastal cities to look at the relationship between environmental values and urban expansionist paradigms through reclamation projects. It argues that these thresholds, occurring contemporaneously in expanding metropolitan regions, correspond to changing conceptualizations of urban–nature relationships, in other words urban core's changing relationships to fringe ecosystems. The metropolitan regions used as case studies for this piece are Mumbai, Amsterdam, New York, and Tokyo. Each has used reclamation as a grand expansion strategy during political or economic transitions. During each grand alteration attempt in these regions, the developers, reclamation enthusiasts, or urban planners revisited the city's immediate ecological fringe for expansion, and following these revisitations, a new geographical order formed in their subsequent regions. The urban fringe has become the socio-spatial zone where new and experimental ideas about urban development encounter complex natural systems. The land-use negotiations and reclamation's role in shaping the urban–nature relationships are missing pieces of the planning field. Any future looking climate resiliency plan today should build on the reading of this palimpsest and understand how these environmental values were traded and how global expansion narratives transformed the urban–nature gradient.

The contribution of GIS and Remote Sensing in Urban Land Use Negotiation in Developing Countries

Most of the studies related to urban environments in developing countries focus mainly on particular aspects e.g. communication, residential, vegetated areas, etc. However, planners who are concerned about urban space management are also interested in the distribution and the change extent of the three main spatial domains namely developed, transition and reserved areas. This information facilitates subsequent land use negotiation processes. In this paper, standard classification procedures have been employed to extract this information from remotely sensed imagery such as the ones delivered by the new high resolution satellites, specifically from colour aerial photographs from 1995 and 1998 resampled to a ground resolution of 5m and Landsat TM from 1995. Postclassification analysis revealed comparable results for the 1995 datasets, whereas land use changes were evaluated by comparing the 1995 and 1998 classified images.