Built areas 185coastlines and/or mountain valleys. Major greenspace wedges doubtless involve
significant regional planning. A compact metro-area form typically results from
concentric-zone-like spread from an initial nucleus (Chapter8). Planning deci-
sions were made to not elongate, to develop along spokes, or to protect green
wedges, but rather to keep the focus on the city center.
Aring highway outside the metropolitan area reflects regional planning, not
only for transportation flows, but also to develop areas between radial trans-
portation strips. As described above, this has important negative consequences
fornatural systems and their human uses. Perusal of the other attributes sug-
gesting regional planning emphasizes that some have mainly positive and some
negative implications for these societal objectives. Thus regional planning per se
is not the solution, but rather wise and strategic planning of large areas, which
accords high priority to natural systems and their human uses, is the objective.
Satellite cities
[A11]Satellite cities around large cities are mostly within 50 km of the metropoli-
tan area,whereas most satellites around small cities are 50--100+ km distant(Figure7. 12).
City size has an important effect here. The relative proximity of satellite cities
tolarge metropolitan areas means that targeting their development instead of
metro-area expansion is more feasible, since new residents are not too far from
thebig city. Also, while the length of highway strip development to the nearer
satellite cities disrupts major stream/river corridors and wildlife movement in
the urban region, it is not as serious as developed strips to more-distant satel-
lites. However, more-distant satellite cities are more likely to be near natural
areas, where outward urbanization may cause significant degradation to natural
systems.
[A12]Large-population cities tend to have more satellite cities in the urban region than
do small cities, with 5--16 around most large cities and 0--2 around most small cities
(Figure7. 12).
The number of satellite cities depends on the size of the core city. Few satel-
lites in small-city urban regions mean that most urban people live in the region’s
core city where urban resources are concentrated. Thus natural systems of the
region tend to be little affected by the few dispersed concentrations of people.
People in and around the regional greenspace mainly live in villages and towns,
and, on average, are more attuned to nature, though may or may not protect it
well.The abundance of satellite cities around large core cities means that almost
all regional greenspace is near and subject to the diverse impacts of many cities.
Since dispersed satellite cities also tend to expand outward, natural systems and