Managing Growth or Outgrowing Management? A Nature-Society Perspective in Urban Planning and Land Use Change

Abstract

A focus on place-specific attributes situates this thesis within a paradigm of nature-society research in examining the material forces and the legitimating discourses of land use change. The extent to which place based attributes present an obstacle or opportunity for building sustainable human societies is the primary motivation for my research. Locating interactions between nature and society is important because individuals do not just respond to social facts , but to a number of contextual factors. Place is context, and although many disciplines thoroughly explore the social, economic, cultural, psychological context of individuals and societies, these are themselves spatially bounded by landscape that is both physical and social. The discipline of human geography brings these process and place strands together, to examine the co-creation of landscape and society. This thesis concentrates specifically on processes of land use change, either directly by conversion of land, or indirectly by increased household car use and zoning policy in three separate studies. First is a macro-level study of household automobile dependency contingent upon a suite of physical landscape and social context factors. Second is a macro-level study of urban growth in Germany from 2000-2006 explained by a number of landscape, topographical, and social factors. Lastly, a third study is a micro-level examination of urbanization and nature-society linkages in a case study of West Hayden Island in Portland, USA. Land use change is one of the most important global processes of our era because it is the largest factor in driving global environmental change (see for review: Lambin and Geist 2006). A nature-society perspective in research moves empirical work away from a domination perspective, incapable of adapting with dramatic alterations of landscape to a co-habitation perspective, allowing a flexible approach to understanding the metabolism of nature-society.