Introduction
The area comprising the Metro Vancouver region is expected to grow in population in the years to come. With an increase in population comes the spatial expansion of urbanism, paved roads and related infrastructure, often at the expense of prime agricultural land. A pro-development perception sees agricultural land as a potential new home for industrial use or new subdivisions. Unfortunately this very perception is instrumental in causing environmental fragmentation, urban sprawl, and unliveable cities across North America.
The Agricultural Land Reserve in BC serves to protect farmland at the urban boundary, however many area are at risk of being removed from this land use zone.
This project used a non-Boolean, "fuzzy" multi-criteria analysis to examine the spatial relationship between the areas comprising the Provincial Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and the impacts of urban land use. Specifically, this project addresses the question of how much pressure urban land use is exerting on the Agricultural Land Reserve.
The analysis involved the measurement and weighting of three factors: ALR parcel size, distance from areas of high population density, and distance from road networks. This data was used to construct a model that classifies the ALR into ranked areas (1 to 4) that, based on the analysis, have a higher risk of exclusion from the ALR and face a greater chance of undergoing a change to urban, commercial, or industrial land use.