In 2003, "The National Land Use and Planning Act" (NLUP Act) was enacted unifying two old laws; "The Urban Planning Act" enacted in 1962 and "The National Land Use and Management Act" enacted in 1972. One of main reasons of unifying two acts was to extend urban planning-based development systems to rural areas for preventing uncontrolled urban sprawl in rural areas and enhancing or settlling plan-based land use system in rural areas. This paper is conducted with the following specific objectives: i) to critically review the contents of NLUP Act in terms of rational rural land use planning; ii) to evaluate plan-based land use practices in rural area by NLUP Act; iii) to appraise performance level for prevention against unplanned development activities in rural areas by NLUP Act. To accomplish these objectives, we surveyed actural state of rural land use and development system by the new act in two case study areas. Ansung city in Gyeongi province as an urban sprawl region and Hamyang county in Gyeongnam Province as a remote rural area. Study results ascertained that the new act can not effectively control rural land use and not prevent over-use of agricultural land in the positive and effective ways because of followering three points.

This study aims to analyze the sensitivity of WSM(weighted scenario method)-AHP method according to variation of nonlinear exponent for accessibility criteria, which are used to make urbanization potential maps with the optimal weighting value for multiple criteria in grid-based GIS technique. Besides this study tried to develop WSM-AHP2 which is simplified by using rank of the potential value for each scenario. The two methods were applied to the test area, Suwon city located south area of Seoul, with time series land-use maps of 1986 and 1996. The evaluation system of urbanization potential have 7 criteria including 6 accessibility criteria. The results of WSM-AHP2, the optimal weighting values and their corresponding potential maps, have almost similar with those of WSM-AHP. In the application of CA(cellular automata) model for expansion of urbanized area using the three potential maps by WSM-AHP, WSM-AHP2, and specialists's AHP evaluation, it also showed that the accuracy of simulation for actual urban area is the highest in the potential map of WSM-AHP, followed by WSM-AHP2 and specialists's AHP evaluation. From the results of this study, WSM-AHP and simplified WSM-AHP2 will be used to generate the optimal potential maps for land-use planning in urban fringe area.

Through the fast economic growth since the 1960s, Korea has experienced various problems on land such as urban sprawl, the rapid increase in land prices, land speculation, privatization of the betterment, and so on. To prevent such problems and to enhance harmonious development and conservation, the National Land Planning and Use Act(NLPUA) was established in 2003. The NLPUA which was revised and combined two existing planning laws i.e. the National Land Use Management Act and Urban Planning Act, has an eye to preventing disorderly spatial development, to pursuing environmentally friendly spatial planning, and to following up planned development in non-urbanized area like rural area. This study aims to discuss what should be considered the pending issues after the application of the NLPUA in rural area. On the basis of reviewing the NLPUA in a viewpoint of the rural planning, this study suggests some improvement policy such as considering various rural conditions, securing excellent agricultural land, applying the District Plan II system effectively, reorganizing the planning administrative, and so on.

For rational agricultural land use planning, it is quite necessary to get hold of land suitability precisely and to make decision on land use patterns accordingly. In the methodological viewpoint, objective and scientific evaluation techniques for land suitability classification should be supported for the systematic land use planning. As one of technical development approaches to rational land use planning, this study tried to frame a land suitability evaluation system for agricultural purposes. Evaluation unit is defined as a tract of land bounded by road, other land units and topographical features. And quantification theory was applied in the determination works of evaluation criteria. The administrative area of Namsa-myon(district), Yongin-si(city), Kyunggi-do(province) was selected for the case study. In order to check the feasibility of the evaluation system developed in the study, field check team, consisting of 2 government officers and 2 representative farmers, carried out evaluation works by observation on 148 sample land units, 10% of total 1,480 ones. Between estimated and observed results, there showed very good relationship of its multiple correlation coefficient, R=0.9467.

As a rational decision-making process of county-level area development, this study designed 3-step framework : function-giving(areal analysis) on unit planning area by decision matrix of land suitability, check of typical characteristics of each function area and formulation of its future development strategies. Two alternatives were suggested as the areal analysis method, of which one is equal ordering / valuing technique of checking indices for land suitability classfication and the other preferential weighting technique. And then, under the algorithm specially defined in this study, land suitability maps(Fig.2,3) of the case study area (Seungju-county area, Chonnam-province, Korea) were drawn from the areal analysis results. By use of land suitability classification results, unique characteristics of typical function areas were defined (on 7 types of alternative 1 , 8 types of II ) and their future development strategies were formulated in the case study area, According to the categorization criteria in this study, all the villages of the case area were classfied as a suitable type of function areas illustrated in this study.

For formulation of the rational land us2 plan in regional base, it is a basic and prior condition to categorize total planning area into some functional subregions by purposely-selected indicators. As one of quantitive approaches to the areal categorization in rural area, Principal Component Analysis(PCA) was introduced and testified its applicability through a case study on Sunheungdistrict(called as myun in Korea) area, Youngpoong-county, Kyungbuk-province, Korea. Areal analysis by PCA was carried out on rurality and urbanity of parish-level area(ri in Korea) respectively. By use of PCA analysis results, classifying matrix was made through categorization of both index scores. Among 18 ri's of the case study area, 12 was classified as rural-dominated areas, 2 as urban- dominated areas, and reamaining 3 as intermediate areas.

As a initial methodological approach to rational land use planning in the county-level area, three types of land suitability classification techniques were examined from the viewpoint of their practical applicability through the case study of Seungju-gun area, Chonnam-province, Korea : major factors' criteria(method I ), principal component analysis( I ), and local monitoring( R( ). Each method has its strong and weak points as shown in Tab.-5. Therefore, when its practical application, there seem to be wide-range methodological selectivities from exclusive use of the best one to intermethodological combination of related ones In the beginning stage, intermethodological combination of all three types were tried to formulate the best solution possible. However, because of reliability problem of method R accrued from non- uniformity of evaluators'quality, only two methods( 1 , E ) were combined into a new evaluation method The applied results of the new combined method to case study area are shown in Fig.-2, 3 and 4.