Abstract
The increase in population and the expansion of built-up areas into natural and agricultural areas results in more than just loss of open spaces surrounding cities. Reduced accessibility to nature, visual intrusion of buildings into natural viewsheds, and changes in runoff requires us to assess these impacts on open spaces. Our aim in this paper was to examine and demonstrate how topography can be incorporated into modeling and analyzing environmental impacts of cities. Taking Hong Kong Island as a case study, we used historical topographic maps to map changes in the built-up areas between 1930 and 2006. We analyzed changes in three variables representing different kinds of human impacts: landscape continuity, visibility of built-up areas, and runoff from built-up areas. We show that consideration of topography (both natural and artificial) is critical to understand spatial patterns of land use and of human impacts on open spaces. The methods employed here can be applied to examine and visualize the potential effects of future and proposed development plans.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 550-572 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Land |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Dec 2013 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was partly supported by a grant from the The Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We are indebted to the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong for access to relevant map data for this research. We thank Leonie Seabrook for editing the manuscript. We thank the three anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped improve the clarity of the manuscript
Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 by the authors.
Keywords
- GIS
- Historical maps
- Landscape continuity
- Runoff
- Topography
- Viewshed
