PATTERNS AND CHANGES OF LAND USE

ratio has often exceeded unity. In Italy, for example, with particular problems of
old and congested cities, every 1 per cent of population increase between 1961
and 1971 prompted an extension of the urban areas by 3.78 per cent— Table 4.14.
Coupled with demographic changes have come increased expectations over
living standards which have resulted in greatly increased land needs. Much
residential stock in European, and to a lesser extent in North American inner cities
is old or obsolete. In the city of Stoke-on-Trent, for example, there remain
approximately 24,000 houses dating from before 1919, despite the clearance of a
similar number since 1945. Most of these consist of small terraced houses which
lack both the full range of modern facilities and the room for expansion or
improvement. Often it is the entire neighbourhood infrastructure, not simply the
houses, which needs replacement. It has been calculated (Kivell 1975) that only
15 per cent of the 68,000 houses built in North Staffordshire between 1945 and
1972 were needed to cope with population growth, the far greater proportion
making up the balance were required to accommodate the demographic changes
and replacement needs noted above.

The planning styles, as well as the lifestyle requirements of the past few
decades, above all the need to cater for growing motor car ownership, have
resulted in most new housing development being undertaken at relatively low
suburban densities. In Britain these have typically been 20–30 houses per ha
compared with inner city densities from the beginning of the century which were
commonly three or four times as high. Even the relatively high density inner city
housing schemes undertaken by the public sector in the 1960s and 1970s were
built at only half the density of the housing they replaced. Urban renewal in the
cities of mainland Europe followed similar trends although there the emphasis
upon flats has been greater and residential densities are generally higher than in
Britain and North America. Finally, in the search for higher living standards,
many urban land use needs have had to be satisfied well outside of city
boundaries. This is especially true of such activities as recreation, airports, water
supply, refuse disposal and mineral extraction.
In the employment sphere too there have been many changes with land use
implications. Most notably, in the mature industrial cities of the western world,
the rundown in manufacturing activity and the growth of service

Table 4.14 Expansion of urban areas for every 1% rise in population, 1961–71

Source: Hauser 1982

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sector jobs has already been alluded to. In the majority of cases this does not
involve a simple switch of land from one sector to the other since the locational
and status requirements of many service sector activities makes abandoned
industrial land unattractive to them. Within the manufacturing sector the changes
for Britain have been well documented (Fothergill et al. 1985; Spencer et al. 1986;
Lever 1987). According to Fothergill et al. two trends have been important. First,
there has been a decline in the number of workers per unit of floorspace, and,
second, there has been a concentration of increases in the stock of manufacturing
floorspace in small towns. Between 1967 and 1982 there was a marked thinning
out of the density of industrial employment with the average number of workers
per thousand square metres of floorspace falling from 36.0 to 21.4, with the falls
being largest in London and the other main conurbations. Industry has changed
from being labour intensive to being capital intensive, using more plant and land
per unit of production in the process. Similar trends are responsible for the
flattening of the employment gradient reported by Macdonald (1985) for Chicago.
In 1956 the net employment density for manufacturing in Chicago declined by 14
per cent per mile from the CBD, but by 1970 the gradient had flattened to 11 per
cent per mile.

In the city centres too, a number of processes have contributed to widespread

land use changes. In northern Europe, including Britain, the spur for these changes
was often the damage inflicted during the Second World War and the way in
which it highlighted the need for extensive restructuring. Further boosts were
given to central area redevelopment by the economic booms in the 1960s and
1980s. Essentially two things have happened. First, a number of traditional city
centre activities have chosen, or been forced, to move out. Above all, residential
land uses have been squeezed out by high land prices and lifestyle preferences,
but industry, utilities and more recently some retailing and other commercial
activities have also vacated the centre. Second, a number of planning strategies
have been devised to make city centres more attractive and efficient for those
activities which planners and the market deem to be prime central area users.
These include the consolidation of office and specialised retail activities, and the
improvement of transport and other infrastructure. What is perhaps remarkable
about this, is that although locally there is considerable variation in detail, the
broad processes may be observed across a wide range of urban situations from
small, old established European market towns (Englestoft 1989), to large
industrialised metropolises in Britain and America (McDonald 1985). Increased
functional and land use specialisation in the core has been the result, but it has
come about in two ways. Partly it is a product of the deliberate policy of
segregating functions, as recommended by the Charter of Athens, but also
improvements in the capacity, efficiency and accessibility of the city centre have
induced rising land values which in turn have favoured high

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order office and retailing activities. In the American CBD the intensity of land use
in manufacturing, transport, communications and utilities all declined between
1950 and 1970, but the commercial sector increased its intensity of usage
(McDonald 1985). Bourne (1976) and Wilder (1985) both argued that distance
from the CBD was important in determining the potential for land use change, but
this argument becomes increasingly difficult to sustain as the structure of the city
changes from monocentric to polycentric (Leven 1978; Muller 1981)
The cumulative effect of these processes, and the mechanism to which they
can all be linked is that of decentralisation, and, to take it a stage further, that of
counterurbanisation (Champion 1989). Central metropolitan areas have been
declining in some ways for a generation and decentralisation during that period
has fundamentally altered large urban structures. Office activities and specialised
retailing have held on to their locations in the CBD longer than most activities and
there are concerted attempts by many business communities to regenerate the core
through new offices, convention centres, hotels, new retail forms and even some
‘gentrified’ housing. Today, however, especially in North American cities, even
those activities considered quintessentially CBD uses are decentralising.
Integrated complexes of offices, regional shopping malls and industrial parks
emerge in the suburbs and are even reclustering in forms described as ‘new
downtowns’ or ‘suburban nucleations’. Wood (1988) gave the examples of Port
America in Maryland, a planned CBD in a former tobacco field, and Crystal City,
Arlington, Virginia, a new suburban complex of offices, shops, apartments and
hotels, and argued that meanwhile the traditional inner city is being increasingly
suburbanised. In Britain, tighter planning controls and higher land prices have
prevented most such developments, but there are renewed signs that certain kinds
of shopping are going out of town and offices are vacating London for business
parks on the periphery or for provincial cities. In 1989, 7,000 office jobs were
transferred out of London, including moves by the TSB to Birmingham, Pearl
Assurance to Peterborough and sections of the Inland Revenue to Glasgow.
In mainland Europe the decline of manufacturing and warehousing in the inner
city and the challenges to traditional retailing from out-of-town centres have all
been similar, and there are many signs of decentralisation. However, there are
differences. The European city is traditionally more compact, has better public
transport and has retained a higher degree of middle class housing. The major land
use components which characterise the European city are still recognisable, even
though later phases of development have often obscured some of the earlier ones.
Around remnant, congested medieval centres lie the grandiose planned
developments of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, the industrial accretions of
the nineteenth century and the suburbs, commercial centres, industrial estates and
urban roads of the twentieth century.

As the present century winds to a close, there are signs that many
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communities are taking advantage of the lull in population growth to discuss what
kinds of cities and urban lifestyles they want and can afford. In particular, there is
some readiness to re-examine the rigid compartmentalisation or zoning of land
uses, with locationally separated areas of homogeneous housing, industry,
commerce or open space which has dominated planning for forty years. Mixed
land uses and functions, diverse styles, types and scales of building, the renewal
of old areas and the improvement of public transport are all coming back on the
planning agenda, with the encouragement of the European Community’s Green
Paper on the Urban Environment. In particular, such ideas offer the possibilities
of reducing unnecessary intraurban movements and cutting down on traffic
congestion. New concerns for the quality of urban life, the protection of the
environment and the needs of an ageing, and perhaps more conservative,
population are set to have significant effects upon the pattern of urban land use
during the next quarter of a century. These themes will be returned to in the
concluding chapter, but for now it is sufficient to note that the cumulative effect
of the changes is producing substantially new settlement structures.

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