World Student Community for Sustainable Development

by Yuji HARA, Lab. of Landscape Ecology & Planning (UT)

Urbanization as a worldwide phenomenon is proceeding exceptionally fast. Very soon many of the suburban or peri-urban or areas at the fringes of urban areas will be exceedingly urbanized. Mega-cities or urban areas with a population of more than 10 million will most likely sprout from several urban centers of the developing countries in Asia. Emerging mega-cities have been accelerated by economic growth. On the contrary, this urbanization has caused numerous environmental problems being felt not only locally but in global scale as well.

The rate of urbanization has been outstripping the planning capacity of the municipality/city governments in most developing countries. As a result, a chaotic mixture of urban and rural land-uses has been constantly created in the suburbs of the Asian cities. This is one of the reasons why numerous environmental problems like flood, traffic congestion, air and water pollution, increase in heat island potentials and others have been and are being experienced. In this regard, the necessity of effective and efficient urban growth control has been recognized recently. However, the dynamics of land-use change in the fringes of cities/mega-cities in Asia is not yet fully understood.

According to my master’s thesis, current urban land uses are affected by past agricultural facilities in the suburbs of Bangkok, one of the typical deltaic Asian mega-cities. The probability of landscape planning, supported by appropriate landform transformation, diminish- ing flood hazard was also mentioned. However, these results will have never been applied to the real situation unless the local people can agree to it. In fact, the staff of the local governance often pointed out the difficulties of this problem. Therefore, we have to discuss about land-ownership which connects “planning” of the authorized persons with “intention” of the local community. In this brief-paper, I will describe the fragmentation process of lands in the urban fringe of Bangkok based on our research in last autumn.