Geographically evaluating urban-wildland juxtapositions across 36 urban areas in the United States

Abstract

As human populations become concentrated in larger, more intensely urbanized areas connected through globalization, the relationships of cities to their surrounding landscapes are open to social, ecological, and economic reinterpretation. In particular, the value of access to nature in the form of nearby undeveloped wildland to urban populations implies a relatively novel type of synergistic city-region relationship. We develop a robust and replicable metric - the urban-wildland juxtaposition (UWJ) - that quantifies critical dimensions of the juxtaposition of the urbanicity of cities with the quantity of nearby unbuilt wildlands, based on the spatial proximity and relative intensities of these two contrasting system types. Using a distance-decay gravity model, this analysis provides documentation on the calculation of the UWJ and its component metrics, urbanicity (U) and wildland (W) and then presents U, W, and UWJ metrics for 36 urbanized areas representing all regions of the U.S., providing the basis for comparisons and analysis. We explore the potential of the metric by testing correlations with “creative class” employment and public health measures. The UWJ has implications and potential applications for demographic, economic, social, and quality-of-life trends across the U.S. and internationally.

Keywords

Wildland conservation / Urban-proximate / Urban-wildland juxtaposition

Declaration of Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was Funded by a seed grant from the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah. Kayla Mauldin and Emily Guffin assisted with data gathering and analysis at earlier stages of the project. Two anonymous reviewers provided excellent guidance in improving the clarity, structure, and thoroughness of the paper.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2022.05.004.

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