Land Use Planning: Challenges from Global to Local

Author: Julius G. Fabos
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: Changes in land use are happening around us every day, as millions of private and public representatives worldwide are making land use decisions, ranging from global scale to the construction of a single residential building. These changes can have either negative or positive impacts on people and the environment, with varying degrees of significance. This book breaks the traditional introduction to land use planning, which primarily focuses on local-level land use regulations, and proposes a comprehensive approach to land use planning, from global to national to local levels. The book points out that since the accumulation of local decisions can have impacts on the national and even global levels, and since global and national policies often influence local land use, all individuals involved in decision-making processes at all levels need a basic understanding of the interactions between land use decisions at different levels.
Professor Fabos analyzes in the first part of the book the historical and modern reasons behind today's land use or agricultural landscapes. The second part introduces how planners respond to the forces that shape global and national policies and influence regional and local land use planning. The book presents various types of planners, from visionary planners to pragmatic planners, from planning experts in the public and private sectors to experts in many other disciplines, such as scientists, technicians, and politicians. The third part predicts the future prospects of land use planning, as scientific knowledge gradually becomes more widespread and advanced technologies provide planners with more sophisticated tools. The author believes that the decision-making process for controlling land use will further improve and become more democratic.