Barbara Prus

Infrastructure development and its influence on agricultural land and regional sustainable development

Abstract The ongoing technological transformation, socially accepted and corresponding to the requirements, becomes relevant for regional development. Understanding this development requires an insight into the related driving forces. One of those, which has induced both direct and indirect changes to land use, and accelerated the urban growth, is the construction of motorways. Many studies have analysed the impact of motorway construction on changes in the landscape structure and urban land cover as well as in biological and landscape diversity, but relatively less attention has been paid to determining the impact of the infrastructure development on agricultural land and sustainable development of rural areas. We are of the opinion that applying hypotheses on infrastructure development (motorway construction) as a driving force derived from a case study can be a way of holding a more integrative view on regional sustainable development of rural areas, and can contribute to choosing the best variant of a motorway route. The aim of the paper is to present a theoretical framework and methodology for analysing the impact of a motorway on agricultural land and regional sustainable development. The change of land features and a decrease in their income value were determined by means of a simplified method. In the initial stage, it analyses the route of the motorway axis and determines the starting parameters, taking into account the width of the roadway, the category of lands taken over for the construction of the motorway, the layout (distribution) of plots, and the arrangement of existing roads and designed viaducts. The initial parameters were selected in order to ultimately enable the evaluation of the impact of the construction of the motorway on four main directions as well as the determination of the role of individual factors distinguished in this impact. The analysis provides a scientific basis for the understanding of sustainable development of rural areas and its protection in the spatial planning processes on local and regional levels. Establishing the changes of farms value is necessary, among other things, to determine compensations for the losses caused by the motorway construction. It should be performed at the stage of elaborating the detailed design of the motorway, or immediately after completing the investment process.

The analysis of settlement network’s dispersion using Ward’s taxonomy method

Buildings together with related constructions and also with facilities of technical infrastructure create settlement units. A settlement network is made of interconnected settlement units that create the functional structure of the settlement network. After the period of the political transformation in 1989, changes in settlement systems have been observed. The number of buildings has increased, their function, shape, colours and mutual arrangement have changed. The aim of the paper is to analyse settlement units paying special attention to the buildings’ dispersion and their division into the groups of uniform objects (units). The similarity of settlement units (registration ranges) in regard to the concentration of residential housing and productive development for agriculture is determined. Information about buildings’ location and their function is taken from the Database of Topographic Objects BDOT10k acquired from the Centre of Geodesic and Cartographic Documentation. The level of building complex concentration is determined by means of the concentration index on the plane. Advanced techniques of geoprocessing are used in the paper. Units’ similarity is determined by means of the method of numerical taxonomy using the agglomerative combinatorial Ward method. The results of the survey indicate the fact that the level of buildings’ dispersion is influenced not by the amount of buildings in particular ranges but their mutual arrangement and its level in space. However, the ranges with the smaller area are characterised by the lower dispersion level which responds to the higher value of the concentration index. High buildings’ concentration is a characteristic feature of not only the close vicinity of cities. The analyses proved the irregular arrangement of units with various levels of buildings’ concentration without implication to the hierarchy of the structure of the functional settlement network. So, the buildings’ concentration is of chaotic character which confirms the high entropy of the settlement network in Poland.