Current transportation policies in mega-cities worldwide lead to major threats to health through traffic injuries, air pollution, noise, reduction in physical activities, and adverse impact on urban quality of life. In addition, a large section of the population in cities in low-income countries has to live in informal-sector, substandard housing. Many transportation policies fail to take enoug...

To investigate the effect of arable land protection policies in China, a practical framework that integrates geographic information systems (GIS), soil quality assessment and landscape metrics analysis was employed to track and analyze arable land transformations and landscape changes in response to rampant urbanization within the Ningbo region (China) from 2005 to 2013. The results showed that...

In this study, statistical data on the national economic and social development, including the year-end actual area of arable land, the crop yield per unit area and 10 factors, were obtained for the period between 1980 and 2010 and used to analyze the factors driving changes in the arable land of the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi, China. The following areas of arable land, which represent d...

This study illustrates how remotely-sensed data and GIS can be utilized to allow planners to evaluate the relationship between land use, environmental protection policies, and resource availability. The case study examines St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana which has experienced tremendous population growth and land use change in the past two decades. To date, work has been completed on developing...

This paper presents scenario-based modelling of urban land use which stem from interactions of the urban functions of Sakarya, one of the most important city for agricultural production and a vulnerable region in terms of natural resources and seismicity in Turkey. The purpose of the paper is to estimate the future land use pattern of Sakarya and discuss the environmental effects of alternative...

farming practices in many regions are causing land resources to degrade—threatening future food security as well as the livelihoods of poor rural people. But, as new research has shown, tackling local problems requires an understanding of the policies and wider economic and social factors that influence farmers in their decision making processes to adopt inappropriate land use practices. A broa...

We use unique store-specific data for a major UK supermarket chain to estimate the impact of planning, which restricts both the size and location of stores, on store output. Using the quasi-natural experiment of the variation in planning policies between England and other UK countries and a difference-in-difference approach, we isolate the impact of Town Centre First (TCF) policies. We find tha...

Farmland preservation is a national issue in modern China. Most studies have focused on farmland preservation policies in the agricultural, commercial and financial industries but have devoted relatively little attention to land use planning. Land use planning is crucial for farmland preservation. This paper selected Dachang County, a typical rural county bordering Beijing, as the study area an...

This article focuses on the development of smart growth, which includes sustainable transportation policies and more efficient uses of land. Smart growth was developed to combat some of the negative consequences of transportation and land use laws developed in the past fifty years which created dependence on motor vehicles. The article examines these policies and their inconsistency with smart ...