THRESHOLD ANALYSIS IN URBAN LAND MANAGEMENT

Paper i proceeding, 2007

Urban land management in the process of planning plays an active role in building the environment. Good management of urban land can lead to successful development resulting in both physical and nonphysical opportunities for social and economic gains. Land use is impacted by a complex mix of ownership, the physical environment, existing structures and how it is used. Land management activities consist of existing regulations (local plans, administrative decisions) and related transactions such as permitting, selling, expropriating, and degrees of actual use. Land use management is therefore a necessary tool for spatial policy in a wide field of uses and transactions. Polish cities and urban settlements seem to be overcoming inherited environmental, economic and social limitations and moving towards more integrated development. There are many limitations and thresholds that arise during the process of land management and development like poor infrastructure, existing negative land uses, and economic returns on development itself. In the 1960’s Boleslaw Malisz developed a threshold analysis for economic growth to help to select the best solutions to overcome such limitations by identifying lowest threshold costs. Successful urban land management is severely constrained without taking all environmental, social and economic limitations into consideration. While the process of planning is neither completely determinate nor absolute, these limitations do cause discontinuities. These breaks in the development process often result in delays or even prevent project completion altogether. The capacity to provide more intelligence to urban land management requires bringing together the economic, environmental characteristics, community facilities, population, the infrastructure, land supply, land status, existing regulatory controls and policies in careful ways to overcome natural and man made limitations in order to realize more sustainable results with the lowest possible environmental, economic and social costs.