Land use development and transformation in informal settlements have been taking place because informal settlements have been alternative way of providing affordable housing to low income people. Many governments use strict regulations to deny informal settlements from infrastructure services but in Tanzania informal settlements are provided with such services. This paper presents the findings on how land use transformation is taking place and publicly used spaces disappear overtime in the informal settlements, the context behind and their outcomes.

Greenways are multifunctional linear landscapes that provide a range of socio-ecological benefits. As a domain of landscape planning research, greenways gained traction in the late 20th century and today, there is substantial interest in greenway planning and design. This is especially true in urban areas, as noted at the sixth Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning.

The concept of a nature-based solution (NBS) has been developed in order to operationalize an ecosystem services approach within spatial planning policies and practices, to fully integrate the ecological dimension, and, at the same time, to address current societal challenges in cities. It exceeds the bounds of traditional approaches that aim ‘to protect and preserve’ by considering enhancing, restoring, co-creating, and co-designing urban green networks with nature that are characterized by multifunctionality and connectivity.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) is the latest contribution to the green concept family. NBS is defined as actions based in nature addressing societal challenges. In this study, we lean on the concept boundary object, broken down into three analytical categories: use, core ideas and granularities, to explore the cohesive and fragmenting powers of the NBS concept, and discuss its future role in green space governance. The study is based on a structured, qualitative review of 112 scientific peer-reviewed publications that use the term NBS.

Oran, deuxième grande ville d’Algérie, connaît un rythme d’urbanisation particulièrement soutenu ces dernières décennies. Il en résulte une consommation élevée de terres agricoles avoisinantes qui se poursuit à l’heure actuelle sous la pression massive de la production de logements et d’équipements dans la proche périphérie de la ville. Cette réalité est confirmée par les résultats obtenus à partir de traitements de télédétection appliqués sur une série d’images satellitaires.

This study investigates different provisioning services in the peri-urban landscapes of Manila conurbation through a case study of two villages in the Jala-Jala municipality of the Laguna de Bay area in the Philippines. Laguna de Bay is an ecologically productive and important watershed for the urban and peri-urban areas of Manila for the provision of food, freshwater, and other materials. However, the lake and its ecosystem are under threat because of rapid urbanization and associated land-use changes.

The character of Amman, Jordan, as the "City of Waters"—referring to the abundance of water flowing in its known stream—has faded away because of the municipal policy to cover the stream in the 1960s which gradually changed the ecological character. This paper traces and explores the impacts of stream-coverage policy on the city character, morphology and land use changes. The purpose is to understand how an engineered problem-solving policy changed physical and perceptive factors and affected the character of the city.

Since Vietnam shifted to a market-economy in the 1980s, Hanoi has seen rapid urban expansion similar to that of other South East Asian cities - involving megaprojects, luxury developments, rural-to-urban migration, informal housing construction, and escalating speculation. Researchers have considered how unemployment and the disruption of community life followed the urbanization of rural areas. However, little has been said about how people adjusted their everyday life to cope with the changes.

This paper presents five design prototypes for cool urban water environments developed in the 'Really cooling water bodies in cities' (REALCOOL) project. The REALCOOL prototypes address an urgent need: urban water bodies, such as ponds or canals, are often assumed to cool down their surroundings during days with heat stress, whereas recent research shows that this is not always the case and that urban water bodies may actually have warming effects too. There are, however, indications that shading, vaporising water, and proper ventilation can keep water bodies and their surroundings cooler.

A wide variety of settlement systems exist, ranging from small villages to large metropolises. However, spatial analyses are typically confined to the mere presence or absence of built-up land and the changes therein, while more subtle differences between various settlement systems are ignored. In this paper we study the spatial distribution of Chinese settlements in terms of their built-up land, cluster density and cluster size, as well as their changes between 1990 and 2010.

US cities are at the forefront of the sustainable development challenge. They contain 80% of the country’s population, and therefore have the capacity to make or break SDG achievement (US Census Bureau 2016). But, while crucial to SDG attainment, they Executive Summary cannot accomplish this alone. While 80 percent of US residents live in urban areas, only 3 percent of land is urban; rural and urban areas are deeply interconnected (US Census Bureau 2016).

The Sustainable Development Report 2019 – Mediterranean Countries Edition is a synthetic review of the fourth edition of the Sustainable Development Report 2019, including integrated contents and tables editing, specifically focusing on 23 Mediterranean countries. It was drafted by a team of experts of the University of Siena – Santa Chiara Lab, as hosting institution of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the Mediterranean Area (SDSN-Mediterranean), in an effort to raise awareness on the SDGs and foster the implementation of transformation strategies.