A Study on the Management of Religious Land Supply System

Due to the poor integration of land use management system and religious land demand, numerous cases of illegal religious land development can be found in Taiwan. It is evident that the religious land use management system in Taiwan needs to be improved. On the one hand, illegal religious land uses have caused environmental externality to the general public and next generation, and on the other hand, a supply system is needed to cope with the increasing demand for religious land. For the sake of sustainable development, it is a critical task to development an appropriate land use management system for religious land development.

In the past decades, the spatial planning system has evolved and changed toward decentralization and deregulation for land use control. Along with the changing of planning paradigm, land use management system needs innovative improvement either. Therefore, this research starts with the problem identification of characteristics analysis of religious land uses, and then tries to identify the solutions for future religious land demand by means of a conceptual proposal.

More specifically, the main purpose of this research includes two parts, one is to propose a new framework for land use management system to meet the future demand for new development, and the other one is to identify a strategy to solve the illegal land use issues of religious buildings. Given the nature of high uncertainty and increasing complexity of religious land demand, it is concluded that a combination of “floating zoning” and “development permission system” should be able to improve the existing land use management system to better deal with the increasing religious land demand.