Assessing Land Use Efficiency to Enhance Urban Dynamics through City Development Strategy Case Study of Damietta City – Egypt

The complexity and dynamic of rapid urbanization causes many negative impacts on urban environment and decreases quality of life in our cities, producing cycled consequences from social, economic, environmental, urban, and institutional dimensions. Urban planning is unable to be an effective control tool, face current urban challenges, and achieve sustainable development. The paper highlights the importance of reformulate urban planning models and set “City Development Scheme” based on holistic view to the city as a system and produce strategies that target resource efficiency, to achieve effectiveness and sustainability. The land as an essential natural resource consumed during urban development process need to be more efficient planed, manage, and used by maximize the benefits and minimize all the negative impacts on the whole city system. So, the paper use the concept of “urban metabolism” to show the flow of consumed land during all stages of urban development process, and the dynamics changes of land uses through the whole life cycle of land development to identify pattern of inefficient resources allocation. The aim of the paper is propose measurement indicators for assessing “Land Use Efficiency” based on analyze the relation between sustainable development goal 11 and strategic urban development process, that identify the main specific urban “sectors, zones, and target actions”, then apply it to evaluate proposed actions on Damietta city development scheme for 2027 by using spatial (GIS) and statistical (SPSS) analytical tools. The selection of case study ”Damietta city” in Delta region at Egypt, related to two main reasons; the first one is the basics of setting city development scheme on system thinking approach which linked contacted urban-rural units in integrated vision and translate it into “spatial, social, and economic” objectives, and actions. The second one related the land properties which characterized by: high land value that outcome from diversity economic activities, and faces an accelerate rate of deterioration because losing of agriculture land, soil salting, and existence of flood risk zones. The main results from this research shows the benefits of using system thinking approach in setting “City Development Scheme”, which scale up our vision for the multi intersection city functions and offers deep understanding of hybrid interactive between all urban components that create dynamic changes in city system behavior all over the time. Also, defines the leverage points to achieve efficient proposed land uses in city development scheme, and determines the suitable strategies, policies, interventions that can help our cities to be more inclusive resilience and sustainable