Evaluating urban environmental and ecological landscape characteristics as a function of land-sharing-sparing, urbanity and scale.

Within urban landscape planning, debate continues around the relative merits of land-sharing (sprawl) and land-sparing (compaction) scenarios. Using three of the ten districts in Greater Manchester (UK) as a case-study, we present a landscape approach to mapping green infrastructure and variation in...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Matthew Dennis, Katherine L Scaletta, Philip James
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2019-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0215796
Description
Summary:Within urban landscape planning, debate continues around the relative merits of land-sharing (sprawl) and land-sparing (compaction) scenarios. Using three of the ten districts in Greater Manchester (UK) as a case-study, we present a landscape approach to mapping green infrastructure and variation in social-ecological-environmental conditions as a function of land sharing and sparing. We do so for the landscape as a whole and in a more focussed approach for areas of high and low urbanity. Results imply potential trade-offs between land-sharing-sparing scenarios relevant to characteristics critical to urban resilience such as landscape connectivity and diversity, air quality, surface temperature, and access to green space. These trade-offs are complex due to the parallel influence of patch attributes such as land-cover and size and imply that both ecological restoration and spatial planning have a role to play in reconciling tensions between land-sharing and sparing strategies.
ISSN:1932-6203