Changing Urban Forms – Geography – UGC NET – Notes

Peri-Urban Areas

• As a specific and non-neutral space, a peri-urban area refers to a transition or interaction zone, where urban and rural activities are juxtaposed, and landscape features are subject to rapid modifications, inducing by human activities. Peri-urban areas, which might include valuable protected areas, forested hills, preserved woodlands, prime agricultural lands and important wetlands, can provide essential life support services for urban residents.
• McGranahan et al. (2004) observed that peri-urban zones are often far more environmentally unstable than either urban or rural settings. From ecosystem’s point of view, physical, chemical and biological factors generally interact among themselves, and are interrelated with socioeconomic forces. These factors have their own functions, which can be enhanced or reduced depending on the conditions of other factors in the same system.
• A peri-urban area is not only a zone of direct impact experiencing the immediate impacts of land demands from urban growth and pollution, but is also a wider market-related zone of influence that is recognizable in terms of the handling of agricultural and natural resource products (Simon et al., 2006).
• When urban grows disorderedly and sprawls to peri-urban area, this process can be referred as peri-urbanization. Peri-urbanization can be regarded both as a driver and an effecter of global environmental changes. Observing land use and land cover change over time can perceive effects and impacts of urbanization on peri-urban areas.
• The complex interactions between urban land use, environmental change, and socioeconomic system on peri-urban area must be approached from systems perspective to understand their dynamic interactions and function and services of peri-urban’s ecosystems provide to cities.
• Peri-urban areas are zones of transition from rural to urban land uses located between the outer limits of urban and regional centres and the rural environment. The boundaries of peri-urban areas are porous and transitory as urban development extends into rural and industrial land. Irrespective of how the boundaries move there will always be peri-urban zones.
• There are growing concerns about water and food security to meet increases in population in urban areas. For cities to be liveable and sustainable into the future there is a need to maintain the natural resource base and the ecosystem services in the peri-urban areas surrounding cities.
• Development of peri-urban areas involves the conversion of rural lands to residential use, closer subdivision, fragmentation and a changing mix of urban and rural activities and functions. Changes within these areas can have significant impacts upon agricultural uses and productivity, environmental amenity and natural habitat, supply and quality of water and water and energy consumption.
• These changes affect the peri-urban areas themselves and the associated urban and rural environments. In the past, cities and towns have been established in areas that had secure water and energy supplies and fertile lands for food production.
• The burgeoning population growth and expansion of urban centres worldwide has placed increasing pressure on potable water supplies, energy and food supplies and the ecosystems services on which the community and the liveability of the community depend.
• The themes of the conference are selected to focus on critical natural resource, socio-economic, legal, policy and institutional issues that are impacted by the inevitable drift of cities into peri-urban areas. Peri-urban 2014 is the first of its kind; an international, transdisciplinary conference which provides a valuable opportunity to explore these issues.

Rural-Urban Fringe

• Urban sprawl is the horizontal expansion of the city which engulfs the surrounding landscape. It is the national process of urban growth. After the 2nd World War the urban growth along with the megacities especially along the major transportation axis connecting the city developed urban corridors which were linear physical growth of the city along the main arterial lines.
• The suburban growth, industrial suburbs, and townships developed around the city occupying the rural landscape. Such developments have a rural landscape which is gradually giving way to urban land usage and is in the transitional stage with mixed land use with the spread of both urbanization and urbanism (physical growth of the city and cultural/pattern of lifestyle respectively)
• In 1951 the American land economist H M Meyer for the first time defined rural-urban fringe as “the transition zone between the city and rural agriculture area where a mixed land use pattern having both rural and urban practices are located”.
• Rural-Urban fringe refers to the interface zone between the purely urban industrial, urban commercial physical growth of the city and the absolute rural agrarian landscape with village panchayat system where new urban land usage is replacing the rural land use as well as the occupational pattern.
• It is the area where the city meets the countryside. It is an area of transition from agriculture and other rural land use to urban use. Located well within the urban sphere of influence the fringe is characterized by a wide variety of land use including dormitory settlements, housing of middle-income commuters who work in the central urban area. Suburbanization takes place at the municipal boundary of the rural-urban fringe.
• Many scholars have tried to highlight the variations in such similar cases. In 1958, Kurz and Fletcher have tried to establish the difference between fringe and urban areas. In 1961, Wissink in 1961, used the term fringe, suburb, and pseudo suburb.
• The rural-urban fringe is a neglected zone as it falls beyond the administrative limits of the city. Many scholars call the fringe area by different names. Burgess calls it a ‘peripheral zone’, Census of India has used the term “Out Urban Area”. Some call it “Rural-Urban Continuum.