2008 Land Use Planning
Urban sprawl and loss of crop and forest land are significant issues in Kentucky and across the nation. In the fifteen years between 1982 and 1997, the U.S. saw a 34 percent increase in land devoted to urban and built-up uses. The largest increases were in the southern region, which includes Kentucky. In fact, Kentucky was ranked 18th nationally in loss of prime farmland.
Planning and managing the land resource across the Commonwealth has important implications to agriculture as well as the ability of communities to meet the health, safety, and welfare needs of today and in the future.
To assist Kentucky communities in better planning their land use, Brian Lee, a Landscape Architecture faculty member in UK’s College of Agriculture, and his fifth-year landscape architecture students are collaborating with one Kentucky community at a time to identify opportunities and constraints related to land use planning at the local level.
Individual projects begin with an invitation from the community. The semester-long process uses the skills and talents of students and community partners to plan and design more livable communities for years to come. The course provides students with important community-based experiences to enhance their learning and their ability to teach the process for land use decision-making while building local communities’ capacity to think proactively about community-identified land use issues. Work with each county typically begins a few years in advance of the actual student-community interaction. This student learning-community land use planning assistance experience has gone on in UK’s Department of Landscape Architecture for over twenty years and upcoming projects are set for years to come. During this time, the course has worked with 34 counties, multi-county, or watershed efforts. Some years back, the department collaborated with the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association to determine the impact of future growth and development on the equine industry of Bourbon, Clark, Fayette, Jessamine, Madison, Scott, and Woodford counties.
Two spring 2008 projects are planned. The first is an effort to prepare for the 2010 FEI World Equestrian Games and to enhance scenic beauty for years to come. Dr. Lee and his students will work with a consortium of local community organizations to identify scenic transportation corridors, rate them for change threats, and develop and demonstrate the feasibility of mitigation strategies within the corridors. The second project will collaborate with the Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission to assess development opportunities and constraints on the hills in Covington and to identify strategies to keep them green and enhance the quality of life. Spring 2009 will see a collaboration with Logan County to develop a county-wide recreation trail system.
Thousands of person hours will be donated by the class and community members. Some projects result in land use policies being changed or adopted, impacting the landscape in the decades to come. All will raise community awareness of the importance of land use planning and to empower community stakeholders to maximize their opportunities.