Peri-urban dynamics: landscape ecology perspectives

Abstract

Through spatial pattern analysis, landscape ecology assesses the impact of human action on landscapes and on the ecosystems composing them. Peri-urban territories represent direct consequences of urbanization and can be considered as exogenous edge zones of urban patches. A decision tree is presented to define and identify the different parts of the urban-rural gradient. For the city of Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo), the width of the peri-urban zone is estimated to be ~10 km, based on a semi-circular model. The limited availability of space for human actions is proposed to be the central hypothesis of a new unifying discipline, named “choralogy”.