20 Regions and land mosaics
ring consists of the outer, incompletely built, portion of suburbia, natural land,
agricultural land, towns, villages, and satellite cities.
Focusing in still further puts the preceding somewhat out of focus, but sharp-
ens up new patterns. A town or municipality is covered with various residential
densities or (p)lot sizes, commercial types, light and heavy industry, mixed-use
areas, plus similar numbers of important greenspace land-covers, such as school
land, municipal land, water-protection land, farmland, ballfields/playgrounds,
nature-based recreation land, and so on. Continuing to turn the lens, a residen-
tial neighborhood (composed of housing developments, parks, fields, and small
shopping areas) appears (Figure1.3), next a housing development (composed of
house lots), and then a house lot (composed of front yard/garden, house, back-
yard, etc.).
Analogous patterns for prominent corridors or strips appear at these dif-
ferentscales (Forman1995,Warren1998,Bennett2003,Ahern2002,Voset al.
2002, Jongman and Pungetti2004,Hiltyet al.2006). Mountain ridges and river
corridors, along with major valleys, stream corridors, highways, and railroads
predominate in urban regions. The unusual greenbelt may be conspicuous here.
The metro-area and city scales manifest river corridors bulging with infrastruc-
ture, occasional stream corridors (most streams are in underground pipes), high-
ways, rail lines, and greenways. Continuing to focus the lens inward reveals in
sequence, a town or municipality (with water-protection and walking/wildlife
movement corridors, roads/railroads, and pipelines/powerlines), housing devel-
opment (with streets, sidewalks, street-tree lines, and continuous back-lot lines),
and finally a house lot (with driveway, shrub/tree rows especially along side-lot
and back-lot lines, and open view-lines in front and back). In short, patches and
corridors in a sequence of scales usefully describe an urban region.Spatial attributes and planning options illustrated
The prevalence of patches and corridors at all scales highlights the
importance of using landscape ecology in analysis and planning of the urban
region. However, let us first look more closely at some attributes, and associ-
ated planning options, for four of the patches and corridors at different scales:
city parks, road networks, stream corridors, and house lots. These four spatial
features are abundant in urban regions.City parks
As patches or areas, city parks are scattered over a matrix of densely
built area, with the density of residents varying widely from place to place. The
number of nearby residents per park and the average distance of residents from
apark are useful attributes for planning (Turner1992,Cityspace1998,Beatley