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Managing Growth and Addressing Urban Sprawl: An Overview

Acknowledgements 1 The impact of human activities on landscapes is certainly not a new phenomenon. As long as people have been around, they have affected the land. However, as land and its associated resources are depleted and the world's population continues to increase, land use issues become increasingly critical. Witness the current devastating floods occurring in Bangladesh, India and China, thought to be caused by deforestation. Furthermore, economic disparity between classes, communities and nations is increasing, and the equitable distribution of costs and benefits of land use activities is more challenging than ever for societies. The type and intensity of land use determine how the landscape appears and how it functions economically, socially and environmentally. Land use, more than any other type of human activity, has direct impacts on water quality, sensitive environments, public health, public service delivery, economic development and community character (MUCC, 1993). Land use effects are more than environmental — they are economic and social. Table 1 indicates how different land uses are associated with different ratios of revenue dollars to expense dollars. For all locations, while revenue dollars may remain constant, the costs associated with residential land use are much higher than the costs associated with farmland or open space. Land use decisions also influence people's desire to move out of decaying urban cores. Furthermore, these land use decisions directly affect the mobility of socioeconomic groups — they have frequently determined people's ability to move out of decaying urban cores (Downs, 1996). Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of population by race in southeastern Michigan in 1990. In the city of Detroit, the white racial group accounts for only 21.6 percent of the total population, while in surrounding counties the percentages of people in the white racial group in the population range from 83.5 percent (in Washtenaw County) to 98.2 percent (in Livingston County). Alternative land use patterns result in differing economic and fiscal impacts upon