Urban consolidation has been featured in Australia for over twenty years as a growth management tool to accommodate an increasing population while reducing urban sprawl and preserving open space on the fringes. Although infill development (also known as dual occupancy) has long been possible, and over the present decade, encouraged under new urban consolidation policy, monitoring of the inevitable changes in residential urban form has not occurred. Thus decision support teams in strategic planning cannot offer detailed advice on the implications of the changed patterns of either changed population densities or changes to access to existing infrastructure and services. We report here the results of applying a data integration framework and tool for systematically detecting infill pattern changes, land parcel by land parcel, first devised and applied to data from the City of Monash. The synthesis presented here refers to infill mapping in different local government areas in the Middle and Outer regions of the Melbourne Metropolitan Area (MMA), including Monash, Knox, Casey, and Whittlesea local government areas. Thus the utility of infill mapping for urban development monitoring and urban planning can be discussed in reference to the MMA as a whole.
Analysis of Regional Spatial Planning and Decision Making Strategies and Their Impact on Land Use in the Urban Fringe
This report describes and analyses the efforts of regional partners to steer land use developments in the urban fringe of The Hague Region, a polycentric city region with nine municipalities in the urbanized West of The Netherlands. It summarizes trends that drive land use change and recent land use developments, and describes important governmental and private actors and their objectives and strategies with respect to the urban fringe. It focuses on the ways in which actors, and especially The Hague Region itself, influence land use in the urban fringe. Special attention is given to agriculture, which dominates land use in the urban fringe enclaves in The Hague Region. Another subject of study is recreation, as one of the main arguments used by authorities to prevent further urbanization of the urban fringe areas. Culture and identity are discussed as issues that may influence discourses and decisions. The report describes strategies for these three issues, in relation to actors, coalitions, discourses, spatial concepts and resources. This report is the first on the case study of The Hague Region. It will be followed by a report that contains assessments of the strategies.