rural-urban fringe

The transition zone between the city and its suburbs, and the countryside. Certain types of land use are characteristic of this zone: garden centres, country parks, riding-stables, golf-courses, sewage works and airports are common, and these are neither truly urban nor truly rural uses. They do, however, give an urban air to the countryside, an air which can be cited as an argument for further development—since the zone is not really ‘countryside’, it need not be preserved.

The inner and outer boundaries of the rural-urban fringe can be identified by extracting urban land use data from remote sensing images, calculating the proportion of the urban land use in a given size window on the urban land-use map, and moving the window to smooth the proportions. A moving t-test of abrupt change is then used to detect abrupt changes in the proportion of urban land (L. Weiguo and F. Tian, 2002).

See rural-urban continuum.