Land use and urban efficiency : towards more resilient cities

Abstract

This study aimed to provide a practical set of tools that may lead to improved urban resilience and efficiency. The goal of this set of tools is to improve and simplify the implementation of urban resilience and efficiency, and to enable cities to plan for shocks and to recover from them with faster and more effective adaption. High rates of urbanization lead to a fragmented urban form with unequal access to jobs, amenities and public services. This, in turn, results in a number of problems, including inefficient infrastructure, long travel distances, poor service delivery, low quality spaces, disintegration and separation. The lack of efficient and adaptive layout and design, integrated land uses and sufficient planning at all levels of government have been identified as shortcomings that only exacerbate the consequences of urbanization. This study proposes a practical and policy-related set of tools for improved planning, promoting resilient layout and smart land use as a means to enable diverse settlements to respond to events such as intense levels of urbanisation. Research was conducted on the different urban morphologies, the composition of land uses, design principles, mixed land uses and the existing literature on resilience. The findings reveal that urban resilience, urban efficiency and land uses are not sufficiently linked and that resilience is not an attainable state. It is rather a continuous quest. The proposed set of tools could potentially improve urban resilience and efficiency. Tools include the ability of a daily urban system with all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales to maintain or rapidly return to their designated functions in the aftermath of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit its current or future adaptive capacity. This study is not focused on a specific study area, as it had in view the development of a generic set of tools. It incorporates national and international case studies that were utilized to determine the extent to which urban resilience and urban efficiency are implemented in terms of different types of land uses. The case studies include Barcelona, New Delhi and Durban. The three cities were studied in terms of their policy, legislation, physical form and land use composition. The lessons learnt from these case studies gave rise to the tools and policy proposals. The empirical study revealed that current research, legislation and policies mainly focus on resilience in terms of natural disasters and shocks, with little emphasis on urban resilience, especially with regard to land use types and the impact on urban efficiency. This study creates a number of opportunities and contributes potential solutions that could lead to improved and continuous implementation of urban resilience and efficiency. The possible solutions are based on a two-pronged approach and include both practical, policy and legislationbased proposals, which, if implemented effectively, could lead to improved urban resilience and urban efficiency