The Commission has been in the forefront of promoting good governance and accountability in the land sector. Progress in the land sector has been mixed. Through the effort of the government, support agencies and other stakeholders the Commission was able to devolve its function to the 47 counties through the County Land Management Boards (CLMBs). The CLMBs have in effect devolved land services throughout Kenya. However, achieving land, better land governance, accountability in the land sector and ensuring secure land rights for all Kenyan is still to be achieved.

The Cadastral system in Kenya was established in 1903 to support land alienation for the white settlers who had come into the country in the early part of the 20th Century. In the last hundred years, the system has remained more or less the same, where land records are kept in paper format and majority of operations are carried out on a manual basis. The lack of a modern cadastral system has contributed to problems in land administration in the country.

The Constitution of Kenya 2010 apportions responsibility of planning to both National and County governments. The County Government Act, 2012 obligates county governments to prepare and implement County Integrated Development Plans (CIDP). The CIDPs are, according to the act, five year plans that will form the basis of annual budgetary allocation by the county governments.

Residents, developers and civic officials are often faced with difficult decisions about appropriate land uses in and around metropolitan boundaries. Urban expansion brings with it the potential for negative environmental impacts, but there are alternatives, such as conservation subdivision design (CSD) or low-impact development (LID), which offer the possibility of mitigating some of these effects at the development site.

Efforts in post-industrial countries to refine environment and planning administration in the face of unprecedented urban growth have important implications for ecological systems and human quality of life. This paper uses the case of an urban riparian corridor in South East Queensland, Australia to contribute to understandings of interactions between land use planning processes, watershed management initiatives and broader administrative structures in urban and rapidly urbanising settings. In particular it examines the understudied application of watershed management to an urban setting.

This study aims at establishing an approach for the analysis of urban growth dynamics to support urban planning decisions in Egypt. This approach is based on the UPlan model. It acknowledges the lack of historical land use detailed data in most of the Egyptian cities and is heavily based on socioeconomic and land use patterns collected from field surveys and census data. The model is tested on Wadi El Natrun city, an urban agglomeration located on the agricultural fringes of the Nile River. Several scenarios are generated based on changes in a set of attractors, discouragements, and masks.

A scientific approach to urban planning is required to ensure environmental protection and ecological sustainability. This paper presents a range of urban land-use scenarios and their implications for urban development and economic demand in the Old Town of Lijiang. Using geographic information system (GIS) and questionnaire analysis, three future urban planning scenarios were created based on data and storylines for the Lijiang region. In all scenarios, urban growth arises from population increase due to tourism and economic change.

Population is a key indicator of socioeconomic development, urban planning and environmental protection, particularly for developing countries like China. But, census data for any given area are neither always available nor adequately reflect the internal differences of population. The authors tried to overcome this problem by spatializing the population across China through utilizing integer night-time imagery (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System, DMSP/OLS) and land-use data.

By focusing on Guangzhou, this paper examines how different concepts of city in terms of urban-rural relationships are shaped in transforming China since 1949, and explores how they influence the way in which urban planning are practiced. In the pre-reform era, the city was defined as a productive space under the system of urban-rural segregation established for securing rapid industrialization. Urban planning was thus only concerned with the development of urban areas.

Urban planners are increasingly interested in agriculture around cities and have to decide whether to maintain or not areas of agricultural land use within and close to growing cities. There is therefore a need for researchers to design tools to guide public decision-making on land use. Various approaches, originating from different disciplines, may be adopted in this respect. We designed an interdisciplinary research program in order to test two related concepts: the “sustainability” and the “multi-functionality” of agriculture.

Building extraction from remote sensing images is very important in many fields, such as urban planning, land use investigation, damage assessment, and so on. In polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imagery, the buildings not only have typical polarimetric features but also have rich texture features. In this paper, the texture information is introduced to improve the accuracy of urban building extraction from PolSAR imagery by a new method called cross reclassification .