This study aims at establishing an approach for the analysis of urban growth dynamics to support urban planning decisions in Egypt. This approach is based on the UPlan model. It acknowledges the lack of historical land use detailed data in most of the Egyptian cities and is heavily based on socioeconomic and land use patterns collected from field surveys and census data. The model is tested on Wadi El Natrun city, an urban agglomeration located on the agricultural fringes of the Nile River. Several scenarios are generated based on changes in a set of attractors, discouragements, and masks.

A scientific approach to urban planning is required to ensure environmental protection and ecological sustainability. This paper presents a range of urban land-use scenarios and their implications for urban development and economic demand in the Old Town of Lijiang. Using geographic information system (GIS) and questionnaire analysis, three future urban planning scenarios were created based on data and storylines for the Lijiang region. In all scenarios, urban growth arises from population increase due to tourism and economic change.

Population is a key indicator of socioeconomic development, urban planning and environmental protection, particularly for developing countries like China. But, census data for any given area are neither always available nor adequately reflect the internal differences of population. The authors tried to overcome this problem by spatializing the population across China through utilizing integer night-time imagery (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System, DMSP/OLS) and land-use data.

By focusing on Guangzhou, this paper examines how different concepts of city in terms of urban-rural relationships are shaped in transforming China since 1949, and explores how they influence the way in which urban planning are practiced. In the pre-reform era, the city was defined as a productive space under the system of urban-rural segregation established for securing rapid industrialization. Urban planning was thus only concerned with the development of urban areas.

Urban planners are increasingly interested in agriculture around cities and have to decide whether to maintain or not areas of agricultural land use within and close to growing cities. There is therefore a need for researchers to design tools to guide public decision-making on land use. Various approaches, originating from different disciplines, may be adopted in this respect. We designed an interdisciplinary research program in order to test two related concepts: the “sustainability” and the “multi-functionality” of agriculture.

Building extraction from remote sensing images is very important in many fields, such as urban planning, land use investigation, damage assessment, and so on. In polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imagery, the buildings not only have typical polarimetric features but also have rich texture features. In this paper, the texture information is introduced to improve the accuracy of urban building extraction from PolSAR imagery by a new method called cross reclassification .

The fragmentation of construction land due to decentralised urban development, disorderly mixed land use, and large-scale transportation infrastructure poses a threat to urban integrity. There is a need to quantify the fragmentation level in a consistent way for inclusion in planning-related decisions. In the context of China's urban sprawl, this study develops a quantitative and intuitive index approach that planners can use to analyse multiple fragmentation features of construction land within urban areas.

In human dominated landscapes, ecosystems are under increasing pressures caused by urbanization and infrastructure development. In Alpine valleys remnant natural areas are increasingly affected by habitat fragmentation and loss. In these contexts, there is a growing risk of local extinction for wildlife populations; hence assessing the consequences on biodiversity of proposed land use changes is extremely important. The article presents a methodology to assess the impacts of land use changes on target species at a local scale.

Non-point source (NPS) pollution has become a major source of water pollution. A combination of models would provide the necessary direction and approaches designed to control NPS pollution through land use planning. In this study, NPS pollution load was simulated in urban planning, historic trends and ecological protection land use scenarios based on the Conversion of Land Use and its Effect at Small regional extent (CLUE-S) and Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) models applied to Hunhe-Taizi River Watershed, Liaoning Province, China.

Objective: The global obesity epidemic has been partially attributed to modern environments that encourage inactivity and overeating, yet few studies have examined specific features of the physical neighborhood environment that influence obesity. Using two different measurement methods, this study sought to identify and compare perceived and observed neighborhood indicators of obesity and a high-risk profile of being obese and inactive.

Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economy has achieved remarkable development and so does the urbanization. However, there is an unavoidable contradiction between urban sprawl and the protection of arable land and the environment. By redefining the urban sprawl boundary, this paper is to provide a solution for the conflict above on the China’s urbanization context. The ideal boundary, moderate boundary and limit boundary are defined for urban sprawl in space.

This study evaluates how urban residents value variety, spatial configuration, and patterns of open space in their neighborhoods. Quantitative matrices that were borrowed from landscape ecology were first used to measure the variety and spatial arrangement of open space plots and landuses around houses. Amenity values of those measures were then evaluated in a hedonic regression that was corrected for identification problem caused by the endogeneity of landuse variables.