Urbanisation in rural areas - Soil Essentials: Managing Your Farm's Primary Asset - page 140

The need for future planning
There is an exponentially increasing demand for food and fibre, based on global
population increases. At the same time there is a continuing reduction in the
availability of quality agricultural land with much of the land being lost to other
uses, particularly urbanisation and infrastructure demands.
There is a need to rethink how land is utilised for the future, and this is
especially so when it comes to urbanisation. There needs to be recognition that it
will be necessary to plan land use carefully and to prioritise land use for particular
purposes (such as industrial, rural and so on). It is no good having well-planned
cities built on quality agricultural land if the inhabitants of the city are starving
through lack of suitable land to grow food.
The answer to this problem is to plan to reserve quality land for agriculture,
and urbanise lower quality land. Infrastructure support such as roads needs to be
kept at minimum suitable levels to serve community needs, and the geographical
locations of future urban areas needs to be carefully considered.
Local planning needs to identify the 'green' areas with good soil and water
supplies, and designate them for the food and fibre needs of the community.
Urban areas should be located on the poorer soils and planned for efficiency of
use of space, and with adequate, but minimum areas used for infrastructure
support.
Future development needs to be very carefully planned to minimise the urban
encroachment of quality land, which is better used for agriculture, or
environmental needs such as forested areas to supply clean water and replenish
atmospheric oxygen. These issues will become vitally important over the next few
decades, and planning needs to start now. The right of governments and
individuals to own, occupy and use land in future may be linked much more
closely to the planet's long-term survival than it is at present.
Infrastructure needs
There is a great deal of quality agricultural land used for infrastructure purposes,
such as road and rail reserves, water supply dams and easements for power
distribution. Certainly a proportion of this use is quite unavoidable, but if the
costing of these works took account of the cost of loss of irreplaceable quality land,
then the planning stage may allow rerouting to minimise these losses.
The cost of infrastructure would then take into account the cost of supporting
a larger global population, and any extra capital costs would be offset by the cost of
sustainable survival.