Zoning

The land use planning process also involves a spatial zoning of the resources across the natural land units. The zoning concept is used differently in rural agricultural land use planning as compared to peri-urban planning. In the latter case it is the end-product of the process, in the form of prescriptive use, the agreed and legally enforced allocation of peri-urban land for specific use, such as housing, industry, physical infrastructure, recreation, or supply of horticultural produce, accompanied by legal rules on land markets (prescriptive or allocative zoning).

In rural planning with an agricultural production and/or environmental protection focus, zoning normally precedes the actual land use planning process. Such agro-ecological or indicative zoning concerns a subdivision of the rural lands on the basis of the physical and biological characteristics and qualities of the various natural land units (climate, soils, terrain forms, land cover and to a degree its water resources) as well as their prevailing socio-economic conditions. Together, they form the basis for the delineation of land Resource Management Domains (RMD), i.e. rural areas, where both agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions are so similar that one can expect that development or conservation oriented "intervention packages" can be successfully transferred from one site to another.

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