The Earth’s landscape has a complex evolution and is the result of the interactions involving surficial processes, climate, tectonic, and human activity [...]

This paper outlines Singapore’s major sustainability challenges and its policy response in the areas of land use, transportation, waste management, water, and energy. We review the current and past Concept Plans from the perspective of sustainable land use and provide an overview of transportation policy in Singapore. We also examine Singapore’s policies to manage increasing wastes and review the four tap water management plan. Finally, we look at various initiatives by the government for sustainable use of energy.

Beginning during the colonial period, and greatly accelerating following independence in 1965, Singapore has used land reclamation to increase its national domain by nearly 25 per cent. The construction of new land was a key component of the nation’s celebrated rise from ‘third world’ to ‘first world’ in the postcolonial period. But the economic benefits of remaking Singapore’s coastline came at significant ecological and social costs. Nearly all of the original shore, and its attendant mangrove forests and natural beaches, were lost. So too were two-thirds of Singapore’s coral reefs.

Despite its ostensible future orientation, research on land use planning has given relatively little consideration to temporality, either empirically or conceptually. The need for analytical advances becomes clear when considering the treatment of ‘end-of-life’ issues for renewable energy facilities like onshore wind. Expanding renewables is central to sustainable energy futures yet land use regulation often treats consents as ‘temporary’, raising questions about how the trajectories of energy transition are maintained into the future.

Across the United States, there has been a growing interest in local food production, which provides an alternative way to increase self-sufficiency and support greater well-being and food security at the community level. This study focused on the Northern Panhandle region of Idaho, where opportunities derived from the local food movement have emerged in several resort and college towns.

The need to strengthen the capacity of CSOs, DLOs, ICU and partners working on land governance in Teso has become obvious if harmonisation of the customary and formal land management systems is to be realised. This is expected to enable a coordinated and systematic approach with one voice.

Knowledge of policies on land governance not only improves the way issues pertaining to land rights are handled; but also minimises waste of time and money lost on land conflict.

Urban indicators plays an important role in the planning and sustainable development of the cities. This paper presents a methodology to determine the favorability index for development of Singapore based on land cover. The ‘City Index’ of Singapore was calculated using five indicators – Social, Environmental, Industrialization, Economic, and Naturality. Two indices ‘Environmental Capacity of Development’ and ‘Land Restriction’ were used as correction factors in the Singapore favorability index for development determination.

With the notion of landscape urbanism long neglected, interlinkages between ecology and architecture in the built environment are becoming visible. Yet, the diversity in understandings of the interconnections between cities and nature is the starting point for our research interest. This volume contains nine thoroughly refereed contributions concerning a wide range of topics in landscape architecture and urban green infrastructure. While some papers attempt to conceptualize the relation further, others clearly have an empirical focus.

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.

The Neighbourhood Planning and Design Guide is a comprehensively updated and revised version of its predecessor, the Guidelines for Human Settlement Planning and Design, commonly known as the Red Book. The Red Book, published in 2000, was preceded by a series of guideline documents aimed at improving the quality of settlement planning and design.

Industrial land is under transition globally. Insights into this transition are important to plan a sustainable future. Since industrial land follows parcel shapes and the transition process requires multi-year data to observe the impacts of such changes, multi-year vector data should be used to analyse industrial land transition. This paper presents a framework to analyse path-dependent regional industrial land transition processes using vector data. A step by step instruction is presented.

Since 2010, the GIZ Land Programme in Lao PDR has sought to improve the land tenure security of rural communities. The programme currently consists of three projects – the BMZ-commissioned Land Management and Decentralised Planning (LMDP) Project, the Enhanced Land Tenure Security (ELTeS) sub-project within a global programme on responsible land policy, as well as the German contribution to the Mekong River Land Governance (MRLG) Initiative.