Integrated Land Use Planning and Optimization for Sustainable Urban Growth and Agricultural Preservation in Pakistan

Abstract

Objective: This research aims to assess the effects of urbanization on the use of Agricultural Land and Food Security in Pakistan with specific reference to the forces of urban growth in large cities like Lahore and Karachi. The topic chosen for this research is the socio-economic and environmental impacts of transforming arable farmland into urban territories addressing the problems of shortage of housing and resource misuse.

.Research Gap: This research aims to fill the gap in the literature on the effects of urbanization on agriculture and food security in the case of Pakistan. Despite the availability of many papers that address the issue of urban sprawl, only a few of them provide a detailed account of examining the equilibrium between urbanization and food production in populated areas.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The research employs a qualitative research approach, namely a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), to analyze the impact of urbanization on agriculture and food security in Pakistan. Secondary data was sourced from Google Scholar, which yielded articles in JSTOR from 2008 to 2020.

The Main Findings: From the result analysis of this study, it can be seen that rapid urbanization in Pakistan, especially in cities such as Lahore and Karachi, poses severe threats to agricultural land, which rapidly threatens food security and triggers environmental problems. Population increase in the urban area is leading to high demand for arable land to provide housing and infrastructure erection, hence low availability of land for farming, which is like a recipe for exacerbating food security problems. Furthermore, the study notes that there is a failure to meet the requirements of planning and a shortage of policies aimed at the protection of the spreading agricultural land, pointing to the need to set urban Conservational policies to address the need to accommodate the ever-growing population and housing, while at the same time ensuring that agriculture land is protected.

Originality/Value: As can be observed from the abstracts, it shows the potential of a research that has hardly been conducted before.