The current paper examines the legitimacy dilemmas that rise from local governments’ direct policy instruments and market interventions. It takes the case of public land management strategies. The paper argues that current societal challenges—such as energy transition, climate change and inclusive urban innovation—require planning practices to be more effective. Direct government instruments such as direct market interventions have proven to significantly reduce the implementation gap of planning practice.

Across the United States, there has been a growing interest in local food production, which provides an alternative way to increase self-sufficiency and support greater well-being and food security at the community level. This study focused on the Northern Panhandle region of Idaho, where opportunities derived from the local food movement have emerged in several resort and college towns.

The Earth’s landscape has a complex evolution and is the result of the interactions involving surficial processes, climate, tectonic, and human activity [...]

As global consumption and development rates continue to grow, there will be persistent stress placed on public goods, namely environmental amenities. Urban sprawl and development places pressure on forested areas, as they are often displaced or degraded in the name of economic development. This is problematic because environmental amenities are valued by the public, but traditional market analysis typically obscures the value of these goods and services that are not explicitly traded in a market setting.

Street trees, native plantings, bioswales, and other forms of green infrastructure alleviate urban air and water pollution, diminish flooding vulnerability, support pollinators, and provide other benefits critical to human well-being. Urban planners increasingly value such urban ecosystem services (ES), and effective methods for deciding among alternative planting regimes using urban ES criteria are under active development.

In West Africa, where the majority of the population relies on natural resources and rain-fed agriculture, regionally adapted agricultural land-use planning is increasingly important to cope with growing demand for land-use products and intensifying climate variability. As an approach to identify effective future land-use strategies, this study applied spatially explicit modeling that addresses the spatial connectivity between the provision of ecosystem services and agricultural land-use systems.

The primary objective of this article is to review the evolution of urban land-use survey methodologies during the last century, with a special focus on the methodologies concerning field surveys that are conducted for urban planning purposes. Our review reveals, on the one hand, that there has been a steep decrease of interest in the further development of these methodologies over the last 50 years, and, on the other, that they have been seriously trivialized, as shown by the simplistic and empirical approach to land-use survey methodology in contemporary textbooks.

Distinguishing between the ecosystems’ capacity to generate ecosystem services (ES) and the actual use of these service (ES flow) in ES assessment and mapping is important to develop an understanding of the sustainability of ES use. This study assesses the spatial variation in ES capacity and flow in the Mediterranean small island state of Malta. The services included in this study were crop provisioning, beekeeping and honey production, fodder and livestock production, crop pollination, air quality regulation, and aesthetic ES.

Over the past centuries, cities have undergone major transformations that led to global urbanization. One of the phenomena emerging from urbanization is urban sprawl, defined as the uncontrolled spread of cities into undeveloped areas. The decrease in housing prices and commuting costs as well as the failure to internalize the real costs associated with natural land, led to households moving-out into the urban fringe – resulting in fragmented, low-density residential development patterns that has multiple negative impacts.

The demand for additional agricultural land is expected to rise by approximately 50 per cent by 2050 on a global level, and agricultural land of high quality needs to be preserved to ensure future food security. However, agricultural land per capita is decreasing. One of the main reasons for this in the EU and globally is the building of houses or infrastructure on agricultural land. There is a possibility that the Swedish agricultural sector will grow in the future and supply more regions than its own territory with food due to, e.g., climate change.

Current urban developments are often considered outdated and static, and the argument follows that they should become more adaptive. In this paper, we argue that existing urban development are already adaptive and incremental. Given this flexibility in urban development, understanding changes in the so-called ‘rules of the game’ which structure and change collective action, is increasingly relevant. Gaining such insights advances the ability of planners to deal with perceived spatial problems. The aim of this paper is twofold.

In this paper, we present an analysis of the change in household land use following a conservation-driven process of indigenous land titling reform in a Cambodian protected area. In each of the two study villages, we investigated how household land use had changed and the extent of compliance with both legal boundaries of titled areas and community regulations created to govern land use within these areas. A comparison of current household land holdings in each village with those at the start of the tenure reform process indicated a significant increase in household land holdings.