The rise of urban populations has rendered cities in both developed and developing countries vulnerable to poor health and diseases that are associated with urban living conditions and environments. Therefore, there is a growing consensus that while personal factors are critical in determining health, the urban environment exacerbates or mitigates health outcomes, and as such the solution for improving health outcomes in urban settings can be found in addressing socio-environmental factors that shape urban environments.

In the context of rapid urbanization, poorer residents in cities across low- and middle-income countries increasingly experience food and nutrition deficiencies. The United Nations has highlighted urban agriculture (UA) as a viable solution to food insecurity, by empowering the urban poor to produce their own fresh foods and make some profit from surplus production. Despite its potential role in reducing poverty and food insecurity, there appears to be little political will to support urban agriculture.

Informal settlements represent a challenging operational context for local government service providers due to precarious contextual conditions. Location choice and land procurement for public infrastructure raise the complicated question: who has the right to occupy, control, and use a piece of land in informal settlements? There is currently a dearth of intelligence on how to identify well-located land for public infrastructure, spatially and with careful consideration for safeguarding the claimed rights and preventing conflicts.

Environmental pollution is an important issue in metropolitan areas, and roadside trees are directly affected by various sources of pollution to which they exhibit numerous responses.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) include all the landscape’s ecological components that have a function in the natural or urban ecosystem. Memorial Parking Trees (MPTs) are a new variant of a nature-based solution composed of a bioswale and a street tree allocated in the road, occupying a space that is sub-utilised by parked cars. This infill green practice can maximise the use of street trees in secondary streets and have multiple benefits in our communities. Using GIS mapping and methodology can support implementation in vulnerable neighbourhoods.

In most countries, land consolidation was first introduced in rural areas, with legislation suitable for urban areas being drafted at a later date. This is also true of Norway. The first evidence of urban competency in the legislation is found in the Land Consolidation Act from 1950. It is important to note that in Norway land consolidation remains the exclusive province of the court system. This, as far as we know, is unique for Norway.

The driving mechanism of soil quality (SQ) has important implications for arable land protection, sustainable agricultural development and ecological environment conservation. This study builds a “perception–response” theoretical framework to investigate how farmers’ land use behavior may affect SQ from the temporal and spatial perspectives.

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.

Land-use and cover change (LUCC) impacts global environmental changes. Therefore, it is crucial to obtain cross-national level LUCC data that represents past and actual LUCC. As urban areas exhibit the most significant dynamics of the changes, accompanied by such processes as urban sprawl, it seems desirable to take into account LUCC information from such areas to acquire national level information. The paper analyses land-use changes (LUCs) in urban areas in Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia.

A number of severe ecological problems, and the altered structure of urban spaces, are ascribed to rapid urbanisation. Hence, an analytical framework for urban spatial structure and functional optimisation is highly beneficial to balance the contradiction between developing urban areas and protecting their ecosystems. In this paper, the proposed analytical framework included three parts. We first delineated the ecological suitability zones (ESZs) of Beijing City by applying the minimum cumulative resistance (MCR) model.

Urbanization rate in Central America is the second fastest worldwide and its major cities face challenges regarding urban sustainability. Urban Green Fabric (UGF) is an important material condition for the urban quality of life and, therefore, key to planning processes. We performed an analysis of the UGF of Guatemala City including the identification and classification of UGF, their spatial pattern analysis, construction of ensembles of districts (zones) and revealing citizen’s interactions with UGF.