The major global pressures of rapid urbanization and urban growth are being compounded by climate impacts, resulting in increased vulnerability for urban dwellers, with these vulnerabilities exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of this is concentrated in urban and peri-urban areas where urban development spreads into hazard-prone areas. Often, this development is dominated by poor-quality homes in informal settlements or slums with poor tenure security.

After the political change in Nepal of 1951, leapfrog land policy improvements have been recorded, however, the land reform initiatives have been short of full success. Despite a land administration system based on cadaster and land registries in place, 25% of the arable land with an estimated 10 million spatial units on the ground are informally occupied and are off-register. Recently, a strong political will has emerged to ensure land rights for all.

Recent policies in China have encouraged rural-urban circular migration and an “amphibious” and flexible status of settlement, reacting against the recent risks of economic fluctuation in cities. Rural land, as a form of insurance and welfare, can handle random hazards, and the new Land Management Law guarantees that rural migrants who settle in the city can maintain their rights to farmland, homesteads, and a collective income distribution.

The value of land is determined by the locations’ attractiveness and the degree of direct land use regulation. When regulations are binding, e.g., when a restriction on the maximum floor area ratio exists, the land price can be directly expressed as a function of the maximum floor area ratio and local amenities. We show theoretically and empirically how this approach can be used to determine land values from rental prices of residential structures built upon that land. From our empirical results, we derive two main sources for a monocentric structure of land prices.

The development of social production and the agglomeration of the urban population have brought tremendous pressure to transportation infrastructure. However, the impacts of transportation development on urban land use systems have not been well investigated. Under the pressure of limited land resources, the impact of transportation infrastructure on urban land use efficiency (ULUE) is receiving increasing attention from scholars and needs to be explored.

To understand the urbanization process, it is essential to detect urban spatial growth and to study relations with social development. In this study, we take Wuhan as a case to examine urban land growth patterns and how social factors relate to the urban land evolution between 1990, 2000, and 2010. We first classify land cover using Landsat images and examine the urban growth patterns during various stages based on landscape metrics regarding the area, density, and shape. Afterwards, principal component analysis and census data are used to extract key social factors.

Strong national institutional arrangements in the geospatial information management are essential for successful implementation of sustainable land administration system. However, it is not only the existence of institutions but also their effectiveness that leads to the intended goals and reaching of objectives.

Land use planning as strategic instruments to guide urban dynamics faces particular challenges in the Global South, including Sub-Saharan Africa, where urgent interventions are required to improve urban and environmental sustainability. This study investigated and identified key challenges of land use planning and its environmental assessments to improve the urban and environmental sustainability of city-regions.

Spatio-temporal characterization of urban expansion is the first step towards understanding how cities grow in space. We summarize two approaches used in urban expansion measurement, namely, concentric-ring analysis and grid-based analysis. Concentric-ring analysis divides urban areas into a series of rings, which is used to quantify the distance decay of urban elements from city centers. Grid-based analysis partitions a city into regular grids that are used to interpret local dynamics of urban growth.

Suburban growth and its impacts on surface runoff were investigated using the soil conservation service curve number (SCS-CN) model, compared with the integrated advanced remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS)-based integrated approach, over South Kingston, Rhode Island, USA. This study analyzed and employed the supervised classification method on four Landsat images from 1994, 2004, 2014, and 2020 to detect land-use pattern changes through remote sensing applications. Results showed that 68.6% urban land expansion was reported from 1994 to 2020 in this suburban area.

Taking the Bohai Economic Rim as the research area and 44 prefecture-level cities as research objects, on the basis of deepening the connotation of urban land use morphology, we constructed a multi-dimensional indicator system for urban land use transition based on the dominant and recessive morphologies of land use.

Exploring the dynamic relationship and coupling coordination between urban industrial co-agglomeration and intensive land use is vital to ensure high-quality urban development. Based on an industrial co-agglomeration model, a revised intensive land use model, and a coupling coordination model, this paper comprehensively measured the urban industrial co-agglomeration and intensive land use coupling coordination in eight cities in the Chengdu metropolitan area from 2004 to 2018.