sustainability Article Spatiotemporal Analysis of the Formation of Informal Settlements in a Metropolitan Fringe: Seoul (1950–2015) Yiwen Han 1,2, Youngkeun Song 1,2,*, Lindsay Burnette 3 and David Lammers 4 1 Interdisciplinary Program in Landscape Architecture, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Korea;
[email protected] 2 Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Korea 3 Department of Landscape of Architecture and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA;
[email protected] 4 CDP Europe, Potsdamer Platz-Kemperplatz 1, Berlin 10785, Germany;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +82-10-8007-2939 Received: 3 May 2017; Accepted: 29 June 2017; Published: 6 July 2017 Abstract: In many metropolitan areas, the urban fringe is defined by highly sensitive habitats such as forests and wetlands. However, the explosive growth of urban areas has led to the formation of informal settlements in the urban fringe, subsequently threatening these sensitive habitats and exaggerating several social and environmental problems. We seek to improve the current understanding of informal settlements and their formation in the metropolitan fringe through a comprehensive spatiotemporal analysis of the Guryong Area (GA) in the Gangnam District, Seoul, South Korea. We measured the land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes in the entire GA from 1950 to 2015, and then analyzed the changes in one specific land-use type defined as “spontaneous settlements”. We then combined these changes with landform and slope data in 600-m-wide bands along the gradient of urbanization. The results showed spontaneous settlements distributed in small clusters in 1975, and the growth of this distribution into larger, more condensed clusters beginning in 1985.