Abstract
A city is a constructed landscape which epitomizes human intelligence and creativity, depicts social, cultural and economic development and still remains the most favorable and important habitat for the human species. Cities continue to grow, yet covering only about 3% of the earth’s surface, causing major negative impacts to the environment such as the natural resources depletion, carbon emissions, pollution of ground water, etc. A resilient city is a flexible, adaptable to change organism which comes in a form of equilibrium to meet quality criteria of living. Change is always reflected in form. The hypothesis of this study is whether monitoring of spatio-temporal landscape change is an important method in examining landscape resilience. It focuses mainly on the notions of transformation, time and process using the principles of landscape ecology, in order to capture the way a landscape may respond to environmental, social and economic change. A relative research presented hereby was conducted between 2010 and 2012 and included the study of the spatio-temporal change in the suburban landscape east of the city of Thessaloniki, an area of approximately 10 K hectares. Results demonstrated change in LULC patterns of thirteen (13) different land use/cover types and the transformation of a once arable agricultural landscape into a suburban landscape with mixed residential and agricultural uses. Socio-economic and ecological factors influenced this drastic change in structure and function of the landscape in study. The study concludes that monitoring spatio-temporal landscape change contributes in examining the potentially of a landscape towards resilience.
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Notes
- 1.
Urban projects under the resilience platform like ‘TURAS’ (Transitioning towards Urban Resilience and Sustainability) and ‘100 Resilient Cities’ recognize common threats in cities and via a creation of a network, information is circulated and cities can learn from each other. In 100 Resilient Cities the capacity to strengthen the city’s living conditions explores not only the physical vulnerability of some cities i.e. New Orleans’ and Byblos’ exposure to hurricane, typhoon, cyclone, but also social problems like inequity, which is apparent in Medellín, Colombia. For 100 Resilient Cities, 36 ‘resilient challenges’ were identified. These are: aging infrastructure, chronic energy shortages, declining of aging population, depletion of natural resources, disease outbreak, drought, earthquake, economic shifts, endemic crime and violence, epidemic of drugs and alcohol abuse, flooding (coastal and rainfall), food shortage, hazardous materials accident, heat wave, high unemployment, hurricane, typhoon, cyclone, infrastructure failure, insufficient educational infrastructure, intractable homelessness, lack of affordable housing, landslide, overpopulation, pollution or environmental degradation, poor health infrastructure, poor transportation system, rapid growth, refugees, resource scarcity, riot or civil unrest, rising sea level and coastal erosion, social inequity, terrorism, tropical storms, tsunami, volcanic activity and wildfires. In TURAS, the challenge is focused in the acknowledgement that ‘Many urban areas are vulnerable to gradual environmental change and many city dwellers are concerned with the impacts of rapid or unregulated land use change, environmental health and human well-being’ (http://www.turas-cities.org/challenges).
- 2.
Leon C. Megginson, a Louisiana State University business professor gave a speech at the convention of the Southwestern Social Science Association in 1963 where he presented his own idiosyncratic interpretation of the central idea outlined in Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’, yet as in many cases, it is believed that over time Megginson’s remarks were streamlined and reassigned directly to Charles Darwin. Source: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/04/adapt/.
- 3.
She entitles here article in Topos Magazine 90, ‘Resilience: Designing the New Sustainability’. (https://www.toposmagazine.com/topos-90-resilient-cities-and-landscapes/#!/foto-post-1219-3).
- 4.
Resources which cause species to compete in the suburban landscape are land, water, energy and others.
- 5.
Competition as a law of nature is defined as the interaction between two organisms which occurs in their attempt to possess/attain a resource which is important for both species, this resource is either abundant or rare, yet in the attempt of having it or using it, the one species effects unfavorably the other one (Birch 1957; Krebs 1972 in Gerakis 1975).
- 6.
An ecotone is a transition area between two biomes, it is where two communities meet and integrate. An ecotone may appear on the ground as a gradual blending of the two communities across a broad area, or it may manifest itself as a sharp boundary line. The word ecotone was coined from the two word eco and tone, from the greek tonos or tension. McCay (2000) has discussed the diverse and productive nature of edges, proposing that the edge effect may be used as a metaphor for the bringing together of people, ideas and institutions. Turner et al. (2003) suggests that ‘cultural edges’, rather than being border zones between discrete social entities, are zones of social interaction, cross-fertilization, and synergy wherein people not only exchange material goods but also learn from one another and support that ‘key to the maintenance of resilience is the presence of diversity, which, as we will argue, is often found to be at its greatest in ecological and cultural edge situations’.
- 7.
Types 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10 and 13 appear in CORINE land cover. Type 11 is a combination of CORINE land cover 3.2 and 3.3 categories and type 12 of various categories. Types 4, 5, 7, 8 and 12 are unique to this study.
- 8.
Or more actually a Triangular Irregual Network-TIN was superimposed on top of the maps (ArcToolBox → 3d Analyst Tools → Tin management → Create Tin).
- 9.
The suburban forest of ‘Seih-Sou’ was planted in the 1930s with pines. During digitalization, in the landscape of 1945 these planted areas fell under the category ‘mixed forest, semi-natural areas’.
- 10.
Values for individual urban growth forms in 2007–2009 are: ‘continuous urban fabric’ = 7,7%, ‘discontinuous urban fabric’ 16.5%, ‘road and rail networks’ 2.6%, ‘house/buildings with outdoor vegetated or bare ground’ 8.1%, ‘houses with olive/fruit groves’ 0.65%.
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Athanasiadou, E.A., Tratsela, M. (2017). The Role of Monitoring Spatio-Temporal Change in Achieving Resilience of the Suburban Landscape. In: Deppisch, S. (eds) Urban Regions Now & Tomorrow. Studien zur Resilienzforschung. Springer, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16759-2_2
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