Social and Environmental Challenges

Factors Affecting Urban Land Use Patterns

• locational needs

• accessibility

• land values

Locational Needs

• Retailing and comerical businesses: cluster in the centre, most accessible, CBD

• Manufacturing: accessible locations for assembly of raw materials and dispatch of finished goods, less capital intesive use of space, less buying power, outside CBD along major roads, inner city

• Housing: less competitive on urban land market, cheaper towards urban fringe, suburbs

• Burguess model (CBD → inner city → suburbs → rural-urban fringe)

Land Value Patterns

• decline outwards from the centre (PLVI)

• prices of land typically increase towards the city centre → only certain land-uses and activities can afford the spaces with higher rates

• historic reasons such as growth of urban areas next to a river bridging point (1) can means that the core CBD is in a particular / unusual location

• transport routeways and nodes→ offer points of access so housing or industry can develop next to points of accessibility

Accessibility

• many people try to locate either their business or residential areas near efficient transport networks

• CBD is most accessible → all transport routes converge there

• accessibility decreases away from centre

• good transport links create secondary nodes of high accessibility away from centre

Urban Challenges in Hong Kong

• food

• energy

• transport and waste disposal demands

• concrentrated resource consumption

• segregation

Food

• little arable land → dense urban geogrpahy, mountainous

• imports majority of food

• dependent on supply chains → vulnerability to price shocks and supply disruptions

Energy

• nearly quarter from nuclear power, imported from mainland China

• high electricity demand for lighing, air conditioning transport