In the face of increasing socio-economic and climatic pressures in growing cities, it is rational for managers to consider multiple approaches for securing water availability. One often disregarded option is the promotion of reforestation in source regions supplying important quantities of atmospheric moisture transported over long distances through aerial rivers, affecting water resources of a city via precipitation and runoff (‘smart reforestation’). Here we present a case demonstrating smart reforestation’s potential as a water management option.

We examined the preferences for wetland conservation among urban and rural dwellers in Malaysia. A choice experiment using face-to-face interviews with urban and rural households was employed. Wetland conservation alternatives were described in terms of environmental protection zones, biodiversity protection, recreational services and flood. Each alternative was connected to a cost for the household, which was a reduction in subsidies for daily goods. Using a latent class model, we identified three groups with distinctly different preferences.

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.