A performance based spatial growth assessment for land use efficiency nexus sustainable urban development

Abstract

Sustainable urban development requires an effective spatial management of cities which determine sustainability of cities, such as through pragmatic efficient land use. Thus, several spatial development strategies have been used to improve land use efficiency in today’s cities. However, the performance of spatial strategies were merely evaluated; for instance developing cities which have rapid land expansion and form change are not well investigated. Generally, previous studies on urban spatial development were focused on two aspects: Zoning based modelling and urban land use efficiency evaluation merely based on economic and environmental perspectives. Hence, urban land efficiency (ULUE) were not investigated using spatial strategies and the use of performance based planning were merely explored. Moreover, the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban land use efficiency and degree of urbanization were not explored. The aim of this study was to investigate the performance of ULUE based on spatial development strategies. Consequently, this study was devoted to achieve the following research objectives: explore impacts of urban form change on development of cities; appraise performance based urban spatial development planning approach for land use efficiency; evaluate the performance of spatial strategies across different sized cities and investigate the overall ULUE of cities having divergent degree of urbanization between 1990-2020. This study has used Landsat images and developed crucial geospatial datasets consisting land use/cover and urban form change. Geographical Information System and statistical methods including morphological spatial pattern analysis tool, landscape measurement and python modules were employed for processing and analysis of the collected datasets. Hence, the performance of spatial development strategies of sample cities (N=43) were evaluated based on the selected indicators and overall performance of ULUE has investigated. The current study has introduced a performance based urban spatial development evaluation framework to examine land use efficiency. This study has designed spatial development performance indicators and adapted measures for multitemporal evaluation of cities ULUE. Accordingly, the study proposes seven criteria and finally from the results several patterns and performance of ULUE were revealed. ULUE method can be used to evaluate the pragmatic implementation of spatial strategies and investigate performance of different sized cities. In conclusion, this study contributes for urban management and particularly brought impacts on ULUE in diversified spatiotemporal contexts. In addition, this study promotes the use of performance based planning approach to investigate urban development specifically to investigate ULUE of rapidly growing urban areas. Despite this, upcoming urban land use planning studies can focused on investigating integrated method of ULUE evaluation, develop adaptive planning and management approaches and embrace uncertainties to foster sustainable urban space management.