Despite the significant and explicit focus on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), much of the world’s land rights remain unrecorded and outside formal government systems. Blame is often placed on land administration processes that are considered slow, expensive, and expertise-dependent. Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) has been suggested as an alternative, time and cost-effective approach.

As a proxy for human activity, per capita urban land has great significance for urban planning. We still lack a comprehensive understanding of per capita urban land from the perspective of urban–rural gradients. Thus, based on the concentric buffering method and the dynamic-time-warp clustering method, this research analyzes the urban–rural gradient of the per capita urban land of 345 cities in China in 2000, 2010, and 2016. We find that the per capita urban land in China grew from 110.2 m2/person in 2000 to 118.9 m2/person, increasing by 7.9%.

With over 14 million hectares allocated, Vietnam’s forest and forestland allocation has been one of the largest natural resource decentralization programs in the developing world over the last three decades. Given this remarkable achievement, critics are concerned about the low rates of household tree planting investment and question the roles and effects of land institutions on investment.