Implications of Land Use Mix on the Sustainability of African Urban Centres: A Case Study of Stellenbosch, South Africa

摘要

Sustainable development has emerged to guide land use management in most cities yet it is an elusive concept to put into practice. Most African urban centres employ the ubiquitous advocacy-based indicators which dominate sustainability programmes and hinder sound decision making. Moreover, there is paucity in research that investigates land use mix and its impact on urban sustainability in African urban settings. Land use mix is of particular importance given Africa's history of fragmented spatial planning. This paper investigates the use of earth observation data to derive a land use mix index (LUM) and to calculate land use frequency (LUF). It proposes the use of decision consequence analysis as a simple way to put sustainable land use planning into practice and to support day-to-day land use decisions. A model that computes the land use mix and LUF was developed using ArcGIS 10. The results demonstrate that the use of decision consequence analysis, earth observation data, LUM and LUF can aid local planning authorities to go beyond descriptive analysis of urban sustainability to a more robust and objective analysis. Local planning authorities can also use the land use mix index and LUF to effect policy change on sustainability and for day-to-day decision making.