Exurbanization refers to the subdivision of lands formerly in agricultural or non-urban land use into relatively large residential parcels that are sold to predominately upper middle-class home buyers. These new residents arrive with tremendous diversity in their environmental values, beliefs, knowledge, and motivations. Although a recent study by the Brookings Institution reveals that the U.S. South and Midwest possess the largest exurban areas, such development is particularly problematic in the western United States because these areas are typically ecologically fragile and embedded within large tracts of public and protected land. We currently know very little about how new residents are interacting with one another and with long-term residents, and how they are developing and sharing the environmental knowledge that ultimately informs their land-use decisions. This research uses a multiple case, replication design to study the processes by which exurban residents in Fremont County, Colorado develop and disseminate the environmental knowledge needed to make land-use decisions. The research will be conducted within a stratified random sample of 160 households in four mountain valleys, or "parks," that are currently experiencing exurban development. The project will: 1) discover the main social processes involved in the development and dissemination of environmental knowledge; 2) document the informational and perceptual content of that knowledge; and 3) link specific landscape practices, changes, and concerns to these knowledge flows and interactions.
The project will be among the first to provide a sequential analysis of the effects of knowledge transfers on exurban land use, modification, and perception. It will link hundreds of discrete land-use decisions to the social networks and environmental knowledge that informed them. In so doing, the research moves beyond static descriptions of exurbanite land-use preferences to an understanding of how knowledge changes over time. The research team is in a unique position to carry out this sequential analysis because its affiliation with the University of Kansas field school in Fremont County provides sustained, in-field access to a "natural experiment" in exurbanization, as well as to twenty graduate geography students each summer to help collect and analyze the data. In addition, the project will: 1) help scholars, managers, and residents better understand, assess, and respond to the social dimensions of exurban growth, particularly as these relate to the ways that knowledge is created and shared for land-use decisions; 2) provide an immersive experience in applied research for large numbers of graduate students; and 3) establish the foundation for applying and generalizing the research results through subsequent projects in similar exurban settings using other field school facilities.
