Urban Fringe

The urban fringe is an area bordering a metropolitan location within the rural–urban land continuum. This area has a mixture of urban, suburban, and rural land uses and socioeconomic characteristics. The fringe is in a constant state of flux as rural land is overcome and becomes a more urban area as people and businesses seek open land and proximity to the market. When the new area is completely urbanized, a new fringe emerges—expanding farther out from the center. The area's size and specific characteristics vary from locale to locale due to many factors such as the urban center's size, institutional controls (e.g., zoning), and socioeconomic conditions. Found in both Western and non-Western countries, the fringe has a mixture of farmers and nonfarmers (usually former city dwellers). The nonfarmers consist mostly of families with children looking for houses with big yards, new employment opportunities, and so forth. This eclectic mix of people causes conflicts about the damage of crops by nonfarming recreation and the increase of land values due to speculation that drive farmers off their land.

The closeness of the urban environment increases the demand for the fringe (especially if the land will quickly convert to become classified as truly urban), which in turn raises the price of the land and forces many farmers—particularly small farmers—to sell their land, or to partially sell their land, reducing their farm plots. Developers become the new owners of the land and eventually exploit the land themselves or resell it to other interested developers. Infrastructures in the fringe are considered to be somewhat deficient (i.e., public transportation might not be as widespread in fringe areas as it is in the urbanized area). This fringe also becomes the location of certain uses that are kept out by zoning laws in the urbanized areas such as landfills and waste dumps. Some farming is successful in the fringe because the closeness to the metropolitan area helps farmers sell goods that have a short shelf life.

This fringe has also been generally modeled into two components: an inner fringe and an outer fringe. The inner fringe is formerly rural land that is being converted increasingly into urban land. The outer fringe is differentiated by rural land uses in which segments of the urban land use have penetrated the area (e.g., single-family houses, major transportation routes). Beyond this area are two additional zones: the urban shadow and the rural hinterland. The urban shadow is the area where the physical urban landscape has made a minor imprint, especially in reference to land ownership being controlled by nonfarmers. The rural hinterland is the location of urban dwellers' second homes found mixed in with large amounts of agricultural land. One difficulty in identifying this area is[Page 517] especially acute when attempts are made to map its spatial extent. The U.S. Bureau of the Census uses the urban fringe concept in its data sets; however, these data are difficult to use in specific locations due to the census aggregation levels. Researchers have been able to use remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) in the examination of development within the fringe. The remote sensing images enable users to identify the mixture of urban and rural land uses.

...