Land Use

One of the earliest models was the concentric ring model devised by American geographer E. W. Burgess in 1927, which was based largely on his studies of urban growth in Chicago, and which related land use directly to its cost. Functions at the city centre are those able to pay the highest prices for being there. Outer zones are light manufacturing, and low-, medium-, and high-class residential areas. This model has been criticized for being too dependent on American urban growth structures and for suggesting sharp boundaries between the various functional zones. The model proposed in 1939 by another American, H. Hoyt, recognizes the influence of lines of communication on land use and is known as the sector model. The multiple-centre model was developed in 1945 and has a more realistic appearance because it acknowledges that functional zones in towns develop round a number of nuclei, of which the CBD is one, albeit the most significant one. Others might be a shopping centre, or a former village absorbed into the expanding town.

All these models reflect land values, placing the CBD at the centre where competition for land will be strongest and land prices the highest. They also acknowledge that areas of high land value close to the CBD may be in decline. Such areas on the fringe of the centre are known as zones of transition, or more colloquially as “inner city” areas and are commonly characterized by high-density poor housing and urban social problems. Since these models were developed, the process of suburbanization, supported by growing car ownership, has resulted in the land at the edges of towns becoming more sought after for out-of-town shopping areas and for residential districts. This trend has weakened the dominance of the CBD.

The traditional models cannot be applied to all towns and cities. Zoning in planned new towns—Milton Keynes in England and Gandhinagar in India, for example—can be traced to formal decisions governing the whole urban structure, with little scope for districts to change their function and character. On the other hand, expanding cities in developing regions of the world may be subject to pressures, notably that of rapid growth, and processes, such as rural-urban drift, which lead to different urban structures—in particular, the growth of unofficial settlements round the edge of the city, or shanty towns.

Land-use conflicts arise between urban and rural areas, and within them. Examples include the encroachment of urban areas on green-belt land, and changes to the rural landscape brought about by developments such as the creation of reservoirs and the construction of new roads. Proposals to change the use of land are subject in many countries to planning controls and to procedures intended to ensure that decisions are not taken lightly. In the United Kingdom, controversial planning proposals may become the subject of a public inquiry. The much-publicized extension of the M3 motorway near Winchester in Hampshire, southern England, was the subject of a controversial public inquiry in the early 1990s.