| dc.description.abstract | In the process of land use modelling and predicting future scenario’s of land use, transition rules are derived from changes in land use observed in the past. This approach to land use modelling does not take the underlying driving forces of land use change into account. This research aims to provide a view at land use change from a different angle, in which the driving forces of land use change are the main focus.
In an attempt to modestly contribute to the current research questions in the field of land use modelling, this research analyses the effects of national spatial planning policy in the Netherlands on patterns of residential land use development at municipal scale. In the perspective of this research the expected results derived from the policies have a leading position.
An analysis of spatial planning policy provides an overview of important policies that are expected to influence residential land use development. For these policies, the expected influence on residential land use development is formulated. Inspired by literature from land use and land cover research, metrics are formulated to test if these expected patterns of residential land use could be observed. Based on the expected patterns of residential land use developments in areas with different policies, hypotheses concerning the values for the metrics are formulated to test empirically.
In order to test the hypotheses, residential land use developments that have taken place in the temporal range of this study, are distilled from land use datasets. The land use dataset for the starting year is compared to a dataset for the last year of the timeframe of this research. This comparison results in a retrospective overview of the changes of residential land use in the study period. In this process, scale considerations play a crucial role. For each of the calculations, an analysis of the scale effects is performed. Using the observed changes in residential land use, the values for the previously formulated metrics are calculated to be able to test the hypotheses.
The results for this research show that patterns expected based on the policy goals can clearly be found in the observed change of residential land use. While not all hypotheses are met in detail, the results meet the expectations in broader contours. Municipalities that have a pro-residential land use development policy tend to show more, larger residential developments than the municipalities with no such policy. Municipalities with a restrictive policy towards residential land use development on the other hand, show less and smaller residential than other areas. There is strong correlation between some of the metrics that have been developed for this research. This indicates that one or two of the metrics can be considered to be superfluous, and therefore omitted a similar study in the future.
In a case study the success of the Green Heart policy is quantified. This provides an insight in the performance of the Green Heart in comparison to other National Landscapes in the Netherlands. Additionally, this works as a test to find out whether the methodology applies in this study can be used at a more limited spatial extent.
Overall, this research shows that a different look at land use modelling can provide interesting insights in the driving forces behind land use change. The methodology applied in this research has proven to work well in general but there are certain learning points. Regarding research on policy as a driving force of land use change, this is only one of possible approaches. To gain a more fundamental insight in policy as a driving force of land use change, a quantitative research like here is ideally accompanied by a more qualitative research providing more insight in causalities. | |
