The progressing urbanization of space along with a desire for maintaining the existing cemetery resources aggravates the problem of guaranteeing a supply of new burial sites. The problem is ...particularly noticeable in large urban centers, irrespective of their geographic location. The paper focuses on the largest Polish cities and analyses the modes of cemetery management for the purpose of securing future burial places for their residents. By compiling existing data and sourcing information via direct contacts with representatives of municipal offices and managers of municipal cemeteries, a number of significant facts were collected, diagnosing the modes of cemetery management and hitherto burial practices. Clear differences were identified in the transparency of the pursued municipal policies with respect to cemeteries and styles of management, yet every city retains a continuous supply of burial sites. Furthermore, common regularities are perceptible on the national level, such as: priority of extension of existing cemeteries and investments increasing their burial density (e.g. construction of columbaria), planning new cemeteries at city outskirts with good accessibility with respect to the residential areas, no plans to liquidate the existing cemeteries, irrespective of their status of preservation.
•Polish cities maintain liquid supply of burial sites.•There are major differences in the transparency of city policies towards cemeteries.•Rising cremation rate improves spatial compression of cemeteries.•Some cities offer preferential access to municipal cemeteries for their residents.
In the Netherlands, a shift occurred over the last two decades from positively framed spatial-economic policies promoting the development of extra-large distribution centres (DCs) and their claimed ...positive employment benefits towards a critical stance questioning the benefits of such policies, fuelled by the connected debate regarding the extensive land use and environmental impacts of DCs. In this paper, we unravel the assumed regional employment benefits of DCs into (i) direct employment benefits within the DCs, (ii) indirect employment benefits in the supply chain, and (iii) employment benefits from structural changes in regional production systems around DCs. We analyse these benefits using detailed business microdata and logistics-building data over a 20-year timeframe in the East-Southeast freight corridor (from Rotterdam to Germany). In the corridor, logistics footprint has doubled, and average DC size has tripled in this timeframe. We demonstrate that, although part of the hypothesised benefits can be spatially identified, employment benefits of new DCs decrease over time, due in part to automation and use of migrant labour. The expected co-agglomeration of manufacturing near DCs does not occur structurally, and although DC-favouring regions have successfully established competitive logistics business ecosystems, they can be vulnerable to a spatial-economic lock-in, relying primarily on the logistics sector. The spatial-economic policy narratives framing DCs as employment catalysts are thus of limited validity.
The ‘geographic’ aim of the study is to find the regularity of the increase in the number of infections in larger cities and their surroundings. The goal related to the science of public policy is to ...determine the implemented and potential effects related to spatial policy in Polish cities. The geographic part of this publication uses the available data on the development of the number of identified (recorded) infections. The part of the paper related to the accomplishment of the goal covering the sphere of public policy is primarily of an overview nature. It contains the characteristics of the spatial management system in Poland (including tools affecting the broadest impact on urban space) and the introduced and potential changes caused by the pandemic.
In scientific literature there is a wide agreement on the negative consequences of urban sprawl for some decades. Quantifying these negative consequences of urban sprawl can be extremely helpful for ...local and regional decision making. Numerous methods have been developed to quantify urban sprawl and its consequences and land use models have been used to study possible effects in the future. The results of these studies, however, do not always find their way to policy makers because they are often too abstract for them. In order to bridge this science-policy gap, this study proposes a participatory approach to make existing methods and models more fit for policy purposes. The study focuses on three policy questions: (1) how to quantify urban sprawl in a way that is more intuitive for policy makers to use in their communication, (2) how to quantify the costs of infrastructure and mobility related to urban sprawl and (3) how will these costs evolve towards the future? Three urban growth scenarios were simulated using a land use model and the outputs of the model were translated to an urban sprawl typology and corresponding costs for infrastructure and mobility. This allows to evaluate potential monetary savings of alternative urban development patterns. The results show that costs for infrastructure and mobility are much higher for patterns dominated by dispersed buildings and ribbon development than in more dense types of urban development in Flanders. The scenarios show that gradually bringing back urban growth could lead to annual savings of 246–383 million euros in terms of reduced investments and maintenance costs for infrastructure and annual savings of 1156–1965 million euros in terms of costs for mobility. Quantifying the potential savings of alternative scenarios of urban growth offers planners and policy makers insight into practical consequences of strategic decisions for development plans that are critical to implement sustainable urban development.
•Policy makers need more intuitive indicators to quantify urban sprawl and its costs.•A participatory approach is used to bridge the science-policy gap.•Urban sprawl is causing significantly higher costs for infrastructure and mobility.•Land use scenarios quantify economic benefits when limiting future urban sprawl.•Land use scenarios offer steering handles to put planning strategies into practice.
Economic synergy is essential in functional polycentric metropolitan regions due to their high collaborative potential between area centers and subcenters, which results in greater competition. Our ...results indicate that, based on the theory of economic geography, economic activities in metropolitan regions tend to be concentrated and agglomerated initially due to economies of scale, before intentionally decentralizing due to diseconomies of scale arising from agglomeration. The spatial structure of metropolitan regions also tends to be morphologically polycentric, although there is evidence for a tendency toward functional polycentricity as well. Tehran metropolitan region has attracted industrial workshops over time due to the economies of scale and agglomeration economies, which in turn have increased functional centralization and spatial concentration in the region. Yet in recent decades, after the implementation of spatial policies of economic synergy, both the rate of specialization and diversification in the region's production structure have gradually increased; this can be considered a result of spatial policies of economic synergy. The example of Tehran's illustrates how policing strategies can promote a region's transition from monocentric to functional polycentric, enhancing the economic role of medium‐sized cities, creating specialized centers and clustered enterprises, and supporting network interaction between urban centers.
The study discusses the problem of public green areas’ accessibility for the residents of large cities in Poland. The purpose of the research is to assess the possibility of applying the British ...Accessible Natural Greenspace Standard (ANGSt) method in determining the amount of natural green space available to residents in Polish conditions including, in particular, the assessment of accessibility using data collected by the Central Statistical Office and the verification of results based on detailed research. The identification of green areas for 18 voivodeship cities in Poland was prepared using the GIS programme, taking into account public green space, provided for general access and free of change. The verification of the ANGSt method consisted of mapping spatial barriers extending the route of access either on foot or by roads as well as closed private areas. The conducted research revealed that, after taking into account the access routes to selected areas, the distance to public green areas increased, on average, from 50 m in the smallest cities (Gorzów Wielkopolski and Olsztyn) to as much as 450 m in Warszawa. A detailed analysis showed that the discussed accessibility was reduced, on average, by almost 10% for the residents of the analysed cities. It was also found that the introduced barriers did not affect the accessibility of more distant, larger green space areas.
Coastal areas host nearly 30 % of the world population and are among the most diverse and disturbed environments on Earth. In consequence, spatial policies have been implemented to manage this ...socio-ecological complexity from different perspectives. Protected Areas (PA) and Land Planning (LP) have been co-implemented worldwide, but they have divergent objectives: the former seeks ecosystem preservation, while the latter seeks land use development. Despite the importance PA and LP have in coastal management worldwide, we found little information on how they interact and what effects does this policyscape have on the coastal landscape. To bridge this information gap, this paper proposes a novel method to assess the interaction of overlapping PA and LP, by employing land cover and population density proxy indicators in order to determine if they are complementary or inhibitory. Using the terrestrial coast of Mexico as a case study, we found that all coastal regions exhibited overlaps between PA and LP: from the 101 instruments analyzed, 60.4 % showed overlap but they only corresponded to 5.9 % of the total Mexican terrestrial coast. The similarities between the natural cover type in PA and its overlap with LP (both ≈89 %) suggest that a complementary interaction between both instruments exists in the terrestrial coast of Mexico. Nevertheless, our results found that overlapped PA had 11 % of anthropic cover and a slightlu y higher population density (62 people/km2) than PA alone (11.5 people/km2), which suggests that LP can have deleterious effects through spillover effects due to poorly integrated buffer zones and LPs’ planning hierarchy. Therefore, evidence from our results and international research suggests that a lack of integration between both spatial policies should be further addressed, especially at local case studies within regional scopes. We discuss on how the fragmentation between these spatial policies can be further assessed using allocation and attribution frameworks, concluding on integrated recommendations to Mexican coastal authorities. Our results and conclusions can be useful to other countries with similar coastal characteristics.
•The interaction between protected areas (PA) and land planning (LP) on the policyscape of costal zones has not been addressed.•Land cover and population density are proxies to evaluate if the interaction between PA and LP is complementary or inhibitory.•In the Mexican coastal zone, PA and LP have complementary interactions, promoting the preservation of natural cover.
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