Defining a typology of peri-urban land-use conflicts – A case study from Switzerland

Land-use conflicts are a concern for landscape planners, especially in peri-urban areas. Planners need to understand these conflicts better in order to make optimal decisions on land-use allocations and conflict management. Such conflicts, however, are complex entities. A common approach for better understanding complex entities is to categorize them into a limited number of types. This study contributes to this end by presenting a typology of land-use conflicts for a peri-urban area of Switzerland. The primary data source is a content analysis of print media reports on land-use conflicts in a larger geographical area from 2006 to 2009. Information on conflict issues is extracted from the reports, transformed via presence/absence coding, and then further processed using cluster analysis with Jaccard's distance measurement. The results of the cluster analysis are displayed as dendrogram and correlation table. Six meaningful types of peri-urban land-use conflicts are identified, namely ‘Noise pollution’, ‘Visual blight’, ‘Health hazards’, ‘Nature conservation’, ‘Preservation of the past’ and ‘Changes to the neighborhood’. The conflict types do not exist independent of each other, but are often closely related. Analyzing these relationships reveals that alleged ‘main’ issues may not necessarily be the ‘real’ issues. These insights are crucial for effect-oriented landscape planning.

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► Conflict issues transcend individual differences between land-use conflicts.
► Conflict issues are used as key variable for delineating a conflict typology.
► Six meaningful types of land-use conflicts are identified.
► Conflict types are not mutually exclusive.
► The ‘main’ conflict issues may not necessarily be the ‘real’ conflict issues.