Historical analysis of land use change and geo-design of rapid urbanization: Orlando, florida, USA

A geodesign frameworks offers useful potential for identifying, understanding, and planning for land use change in regions of rapid urbanization. The framework has proven useful for thinking about future land use change, but isn’t commonly coupled to historical trajectories of land use change. We have initiated a project to study how historic spatial and temporal dynamics of urban land use change can potentially inform the scale and approach for how geodesign frameworks are applied. This is especially true when examining these dynamics in regions where geodesign frameworks have been previously applied. Our new project is investigating these ideas and this paper reports our initial results. Focused on the Orlando city region in the state of Florida in the United States, we first compare the spatial and temporal patterns of urbanization and urban sprawl between 1974 and 2011. Importantly, a similar study of urbanization was conducted in 2005 in order to develop scenarios for future development of the LUCIS model (Land Use Conflict Identification System). We describe changes in the pat-tern of urbanization of Orlando through a detailed analysis of Land Use Land Cover (LULC) decadal data. We then overlay a subset of earlier LUCIS model results to introduce a brief discussion about what we’ve learned so far and what work needs to be done. From these early results, we are certain that studying the historic spatial and temporal dynamics of urban land use change can potentially inform the scale and approach for how geodesign frameworks are applied.