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.

Fondement de toute implantation humaine et matière première de l’aménagement urbain, le foncier est devenu une cible privilégiée d’investissement par une multitude d’acteurs qui concourent à sa valorisation rapide dans un grand nombre de territoires urbains. Pour saisir les profondes mutations à l’œuvre dans les dynamiques foncières, nous les abordons dans ce chapitre en lien avec les transformations des cadres macro-économiques et institutionnels des capitalismes contemporains.

The aim of the paper was to present the procedure of building neighborhood resilience to climate threats, embedded in planning (from the strategic to local level) and design process and focused on usage of natural adaptive potential. The presented approach encompasses: (1) the strategic identification of focal areas in terms of climate adaptation needs, (2) comprehensive diagnosis of local ecological vulnerability and natural adaptive potential to build adaptive capacity, and (3) incorporation of natural adaptive potential through an identified set of planning and design tools.

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.

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 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.

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.

It is essential to understand how urban plans affect urban growth patterns in order to improve current urban planning and management systems. Few studies have been conducted to analyse urban growth patterns of Shenzhen, an international megacity located in southern China, but none of them revealed the relationships between urban planning and urban growth patterns. This study explores the effects of urban master plans on urban growth patterns in different plan periods in Shenzhen. We first quantified the urban growth patterns comparing pixel- and patch-based methods.

Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) measures have been increasingly promoted in the literature, as well as in policies and practices, for their environmental and socio-economic co-benefits. The recent scientific literature has shown a growing interest to assess climate adaptation plans at the urban level, in recognition of the important role played by urban areas in addressing climate change challenges. However, little information is available on the combination of these two issues, i.e., the actual inclusion of EbA measures in climate adaptation plans at the urban level.

Much of the research on urbanization has focused on how rural populations move to cities for work opportunities. This paper takes a different perspective on the relations between rural populations and urbanization. The livelihoods of rural dwellers on the outskirts of the city of Bogotá in Colombia are increasingly affected by the expansion of urban activities and infrastructure. Therefore, urbanization takes place in the areas of residence of the rural populations; these people do not migrate to the city but, rather, the city migrates to them.

Cities often don’t appreciate the benefits of green infrastructure (GI) enough. To recognise the extent to which green infrastructure and nature-based solutions (NbS) are present in the urban policy, we conducted a review of planning, strategic and programming documents of Poznań City as a Case Study.

The design of efficient Green Infrastructure —GI— systems is a key issue to achieve sustainable development city planning goals in the twenty-first century. This study’s main contribution is the identification of potential GI elements to better align the environmental, social and economic perspectives in the GI design by including information about the use, activities, preferences and presence of people. To achieve this, user generated content from Location Based Social Network —LBSN— Foursquare is used as a complementary data source.