Search

Recovering nutrients from organic materials to reduce artificial fertilizer inputs requires the implementation of processing technologies and can involve considerable logistics and transportation costs. Reducing such costs by directly applying organic materials to agricultural land can contribute to pollution due to potential contaminants and unbalanced nutrient ratios. Assessing the cost of increased recycling requires a spatially explicit approach because availability of organic materials, nutrient demand and agro-ecosystem properties vary spatially. A multi-objective model was developed to estimate the trade-offs between costs of nutrient recovery and improvements in nutrient distribution for a case study area in The Netherlands. The evaluated recovery processes included solid-liquid separation followed by reverse osmosis to recover nutrients from pig manure which was compared to a conventional process via hygienisation and export. Results indicate that, even in a nutrient saturated area, replacement potential of artificial nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilizers through locally reclaimed nutrients is limited to about 17% N and 55% P. A cost optimum was found when about 48% of the initial pig manure quantities were processed via nutrient recovery and directed to land. Increasing manure processing for nutrient recovery led to a redistribution of nutrients and trace metals (zinc (Zn) and copper (Cu)), resulting in more localized concentration. Zn and Cu were enriched by about 8% and 2%, respectively, when maximizing nutrient recovery. Our generic model offers a methodology to assess the trade-offs between increased recycling and associated spatial effects to facilitate sustainable recycling infrastructures for achieving more circular agriculture.

Innovation has become a guiding principle for European Union policy. Funding schemes, research, and planning across all Member States are expected to be innovative. This article provides a critical analysis of the drivers and effects of this evolution. While positive results have been achieved due to innovation policies, this article proposes that taking a wider critical perspective reveals important caveats. The article zooms in on the EU&rsquo, s innovation policies by analysing policy documents, projects funded, and on-the-ground impact on three citizen initiatives. The analysis asks whether and how the EU&rsquo, s self-set goals of sustainability, social inclusion, and economic growth are approached and met in them. The findings suggest a problematic funnelling process. First, an emphasis on innovation is created with the objective of systematically unblocking resistance to the development and implementation of novelties in the name of competitiveness, job creation, and economic growth. Second, the idea of innovation is very loosely defined, while, when translated into urban planning, it is interpreted narrowly in terms of efficiency and behavioural change, digitalization, and smart technologies. As a result, (narrowly defined) innovation-led economic growth begins to supersede alternative values and visions for the future of European cities and regions. This can represent a problem for EU Member States as it creates a very limited, risk-based, and divisive direction of development. To contribute to the (re-)establishment of alternatives, this article finally offers policy recommendations primarily concerned with the reinstatement of the public interest beyond innovation-centred planning perspectives.

Considering the importance of visual representations for communication between stakeholders in landscape planning and design processes, the authors identify a lack of critical visual research methods supportive of the disciplines involved. As part of such a method, they have developed an analytical framework based on semiotic and iconographic theory that enables a visual content analysis and iconographic interpretation of landscape design representations. Two projects from Rebuild by Design, a participatory transdisciplinary design competition organized in the New York City area after hurricane Sandy, were analysed to demonstrate this framework. The article presents a semiotic vocabulary based on four categories: medium, mode, formulation and knowledge with which to ‘read’, discuss and potentially create design representations. This enables a syntactic analysis for assessing the semiotic complexity of design representations in terms of validity, readability and interactivity. This assessment enables further qualitative study of the production and interpretation of landscape design representations in practice.

Rapid urban expansion often has negative social, environmental, and ecological consequences. In China, urbanization rates have increased rapidly over the past decades, commensurate with economic growth. This article evaluates how Chinese urban planning was effective in containing urban expansion. To this end, we examined discrepancies between the Land Use Master Plan (LUMP) and the actual land use developments between the years 1996 and 2014, and analyzed them in relation to demographic and land-use change. Our findings reveal that the initial aim outlined in the LUMP proved, from the start, difficult to implement and that certain targets were either not met or surpassed. Remarkable is that the rates of land used for urbanization strongly exceed those of urban population growth. Explanations are sought in a combination of decentralization, marketization and globalization. We argue that urban growth management is challenged by the shift from the centrally planned system to a more market-oriented governance system, with the slowly increasing autonomy of local governments, which creates incentives for the latter to stimulate urbanization rather than to control it.

Social learning is the process of exchanging and developing knowledge (including skills and experiences) through human interaction. This key planning process needs to be better under-stood, given the increase and variety of non-planners influencing planning processes. This article explores who learns what from whom through social learning in planning. We unpack social learning theoretically to be able to map it, and employ empirically-based storytelling to discuss its relevance to planning practice. We conclude that social learning can lead to positive and negative outcomes and provides a useful analytical lens to understand planning practices at the level of individuals.

Although cultural ecosystem services (CES) are greatly valued by diverse stakeholders, the full range of CES provided by a landscape is notoriously difficult to estimate. The resulting lack of objective norms for CES may lead to the loss of the multiple non-material factors that contribute to how a landscape is valued and experienced. This is especially true under ecological restoration, which could sharply change how people experience landscapes. Therefore, our aim in this study was to identify and analyze the CES that arise from people's interaction with their landscape, focusing specifically on the influences of different ecological restoration strategies. We carried out semi-structured interviews with the residents of villages in the Xilin Gol League, Inner Mongolia, China. Regarding the implementation of ecological restoration measures, the people living in typical pastoral zones would be most affected by these measures because their main livelihood (animal husbandry) depends strongly on grasslands. Our results demonstrated that human perception of the CES provided by landscapes is affected not only by the factors related to an individual's cultural worldview (e.g., ethnicity, age, education) but also by the utility of landscape features, which are reflected in the individual's landscape dependence (occupation). Our research provides a cultural perspective for aspects of local well-being in addition to ecological and economic targets. Understanding these other aspects is critical for implementing sustainable ecological restoration.

Widespread adoption of improved cropland management measures is advocated to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) levels, thereby improving soil fertility and mitigating climate change. However, spatially explicit insight on management impacts is limited, which is crucial for region-specific and climate-smart practices. To overcome these limitations, we combined global meta-analytical results on improved management practices on SOC sequestration with spatially explicit data on current management practices and potential areas for the adoption of these measures. We included (a) fertilization practices, i.e., use of organic fertilizer compared to inorganic fertilizer or no fertilizer, (b) soil tillage practices, i.e., no-tillage relative to high or intermediate intensity tillage, and (c) crop management practices, i.e., use of cover crops and enhanced crop residue incorporation. We show that the estimated global C sequestration potential varies between 0.44 and 0.68 Gt C yr-1 , assuming maximum complementarity among all measures taken. A more realistic estimate, not assuming maximum complementarity, is from 0.28 to 0.43 Gt C yr-1 , being on the lower end of the current range of 0.1-2 Gt C yr-1 found in the literature. One reason for the lower estimate is the limited availability of manure that has not yet been recycled. Another reason is the limited area for the adoption of improved measures, considering their current application and application limitations. We found large regional differences in carbon sequestration potential due to differences in yield gaps, SOC levels, and current practices applied. The highest potential is found in regions with low crop production, low initial SOC levels, and in regions where livestock manure and crop residues are only partially recycled. Supporting previous findings, we highlight that to encourage both soil fertility and SOC sequestration, it is best to focus on agricultural soils with large yield gaps and/or where SOC values are below levels that may limit crop production.

Co-creation has emerged as a hot topic in contemporary planning pedagogies. Co-creation is seen as advancing the mutual exchange of knowledge between various actors in an educational setting. Despite the growing interest in co-creation in planning pedagogies, the potential types and flows of knowledge between learning communities are weakly conceptualised. This article proposes the community knowledge triangle as a fitting conceptual tool for understanding mutual knowledge exchange relations in co-creative settings. The triangle was utilised in a planning course to unpack the co-creative logic. The results showed that academics, practitioners and students exchanged knowledge in multiple directions, yet not in a reciprocal relationship.

To combat land degradation and deterioration issues, the Grain to Green project (GGP) was implemented on the Chinese Loess Plateau in 1999 and substantially altered the land cover by converting slope farmland into forest and grassland. To effectively achieve sustainable land restoration management and avoid stakeholder conflicts, this study aimed to understand how local stakeholders perceived the current land restoration process and expectations for future land restoration policy, as well as how stakeholders assessed the GGP impacts on local ecosystem service changes. We investigated the perspectives of 150 stakeholders representing five stakeholder groups including farmers, governmental officers, citizens, tourism operators and forestry practitioners using questionnaires administered in 2021 in the Yan’an area of the Chinese Loess Plateau. The survey results indicated a 72% support rate of stakeholders for the current GGP, with government officers reporting the highest value and tourism practitioners reporting the lowest. The support rate for future land restoration decreased to 51%. While majority of the stakeholders considered that the GGP had stimulated regulation and cultural ecosystem services, they also perceived negative impacts on grain production, livestock production, water yield and water quantity. Factors influencing farmers’ decision-making on recultivating the restored forest in the future were found to be economically driven. We recommend policy makers to improve the compensation standards and duration for farmers and increase the diversity of restoration tree species, and the involvement of participatory processes is suggested for future land restoration policy-making.

Managing public space is a big and important blind spot of urban and regional planning and design. Important, because major transition challenges, such as climate adaptation, energy transition, circular economy, mobility, and governance require substantial changes in public space – both physical and social changes. Big, because managing public space entails enormous budgets and potentials over a long period of time in which management and maintenance takes place, which are largely spent operational and sectoral. A more integral and strategic management of public space entails huge potentials, which are hitherto neglected in the academic debate on public space in general and that of cities in particular. This contribution builds on explorative work on management of public space in academia and on a survey of Dutch managing public space practice and pleads for a more systematic academic debate and research on management of public space.

CONTEXT Most Western-European countries exceed the critical loads for nitrogen (N) losses. High nitrogen (N) inputs make agriculture one of the largest contributors to N pollution. There might be a potential to reduce this losses with an output tax on animal products, as they have low N use efficiency and a tax has the potential to reduce the consumption of this products. OBJECTIVE We want to assess the potential of a food tax on animal products to reduce the N surplus of Swiss agriculture. METHODS We implemented a tax on meat and a tax on milk and meat in the agent-based model SWISSland. The model combines an agent-based model with a microeconomic model at the farm scale. To better understand the low response of the food tax, we applied in a second step a robust two-step global sensitivity analysis of abatement costs of individual model agents. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS Imposing a tax led to an N surplus reduction of 2.1% where only meat was taxed and 2.3% where both milk and meat were taxed. The sensitivity analysis showed that distinct agents reacted non-uniformly to changing prices, so that the effect of the tax was sometimes even cancelled out. This calls for more differentiated policies to reduce the negative impact of N losses. SIGNIFICANCE The overall impact of the food tax was minor as the distinct agents react not uniformly to lower producer prices., Agricultural Systems, 194, ISSN:0308-521X

Until recently, mainstream approaches to low carbon mobility transitions had largely avoided considering mobility reductions as a serious option, focusing instead on making mobility “cleaner” or more “efficient”. In 2020, however, not going to work or not going anywhere became a reality for hundreds of millions of people as a result of restrictions related to COVID-19. The paper proposes that experiences of a less mobile life under COVID-19 may offer us insight into both the taken-for-granted meanings of mobility in daily life before COVID-19, now made visible, and into the potential hurdles faced by low-carbon mobility transitions ahead. Drawing on the analysis of written interviews with 50 people from various countries, the paper explores what living without commuting means for different people, what experiences they miss, and what they find enjoyable.The results indicate that the majority of respondents miss quite a few aspects of daily mobility, but have also discovered new experiences, routines and meanings that hold their daily life together and make it pleasant. Not commuting, thus, just like commuting itself, simultaneously entails positive and negative experiences for most people. Building on these findings, the paper suggests that mobility transition policies need to accommodate this complexity by looking at which needs particular mobilities fulfil. In a context of reduced mobility (e.g. due to teleworking), this means thinking about how needs related to mobility can be accommodated and orchestrated through employer policies, transportation planning and urban design in a way which strengthens sustainable, inclusive mobilities.

A growing group of cities feels responsible to feed urban populations sustainably. This has stimulated cities to embrace urban agriculture as an alternative in their food system orientation. However, while urban agriculture in all its diversity has arrived in the urban fabric and at planners’ desks, it largely remains an outsider to urban planning practices of peri-urban zones. How could city’s planning practices transform into practices that include urban agriculture in peri-urban zones? This paper reflects at this question with the analyses of the becoming of planning practices of the Dutch city of Almere that fully integrate urban agriculture in a new urban area: Oosterwold. Using a social practice perspective, our study unpacks the shifting position of agriculture in the planning practices of Almere over a 55-year period. The paper describes the historical reconstruction by examining the meanings, materials and competences in four periods of the urban planning practices. Our analysis reveals that the integration of agriculture into the city’s planning is not just a sign of the times. Agriculture has always been an element of planning from the city’s inception. Nevertheless, it took 55 years to emerge as hybrid urban-rural planning practices that fully integrate agriculture in urbanisation. Furthermore, the case demonstrates how this integration of agriculture stretches the professional domain of urban planning as it required interdisciplinary and unconventional operation as well as leadership to organise.

Until recently, mainstream approaches to low carbon mobility transitions had largely avoided considering mobility reductions as a serious option, focusing instead on making mobility “cleaner” or more “efficient”. In 2020, however, not going to work or not going anywhere became a reality for hundreds of millions of people as a result of restrictions related to COVID-19. The paper proposes that experiences of a less mobile life under COVID-19 may offer us insight into both the taken-for-granted meanings of mobility in daily life before COVID-19, now made visible, and into the potential hurdles faced by low-carbon mobility transitions ahead. Drawing on the analysis of written interviews with 50 people from various countries, the paper explores what living without commuting means for different people, what experiences they miss, and what they find enjoyable.The results indicate that the majority of respondents miss quite a few aspects of daily mobility, but have also discovered new experiences, routines and meanings that hold their daily life together and make it pleasant. Not commuting, thus, just like commuting itself, simultaneously entails positive and negative experiences for most people. Building on these findings, the paper suggests that mobility transition policies need to accommodate this complexity by looking at which needs particular mobilities fulfil. In a context of reduced mobility (e.g. due to teleworking), this means thinking about how needs related to mobility can be accommodated and orchestrated through employer policies, transportation planning and urban design in a way which strengthens sustainable, inclusive mobilities.

Governments are increasingly facing conflicting land uses in cities. Many governments strongly aspire to provide green spaces for the public, yet simultaneously stimulate private preferences for real-estate development. This paper argues that examining the interrelationship between land ownership and control over land clarifies the provision of green spaces in the context of private preferences for development. It presents a case study of the Carré de Soie urban development in which the government aspires to an abundance of green but concurrently encourages the market to take the initiative. The findings show that the lack of public land ownership combined with private actors having a say in control over land fell short in satisfying public aspirations for green spaces. This paper concludes that if cities need to become greener, recognising the role of the government to act in the public interest is of utmost importance.

Planning consultants are increasingly hired to organize citizen participation processes for urban development projects. However, the ways in which planning consultants engage in and perceive the involvement of citizens in urban development projects remain relatively understudied. This article opens the black box of consultancy employees’ perceptions toward citizens in urban development processes. Employees from two consultancy firms in the Netherlands were interviewed, and several focus groups were organized. This research shows that consultants have wide-ranging views concerning the ways of incorporating citizens’ interests in urban development projects. With the use of Q-methodology, a typology of how consultants engage with citizens is proposed. Furthermore, we show that the different perceptions of consultants lead to a different approach in identifying the needs and problems of citizens. This finding gives insight into the context in which decisions about urban development are made.

A major challenge today and in the future is to maintain or enhance the beneficial contributions of landscapes to the quality of life of people. Neglecting cultural ecosystem services (CES) in landscape planning can lead to loss of unique cultural landscapes and undermine the well-being of local communities. Despite a rapidly increasing body of literature on CES, little is known about the relationship between socio-cultural values and the non-material benefits of landscapes. To help fill this gap, we assessed the perceptions of people from different ethnic groups about the cultural ecosystem services of local landscapes. We took the Genheyuan National Wetland Park and the adjacent forest areas, a typical mountain forest-wetland ecosystem, as our case area. By combining surveys (250 semi-structured interviews and 26 local stakeholders in Focus Group Discussion) with structural equation modelling (SEM), we gained insights into the importance of landscapes to CES provision from the perspective of stakeholder diversity. Surprisingly, wetlands are perceived as playing more important roles than other landscape types in providing diverse CES, with a 1.25 times higher CES Diversity Index (CDI) than that of forests. Among all demographic factors, ethnicity is most significant in determining people’s perceptions, reflecting the spiritual cognition, manners, and customs of the ethnic groups. The perceptions of CES provided by landscapes are likely to increase if landscape characteristics are attached more to functions in order to meet fundamental human needs.

Urbanization represents a challenge for plans aimed at controlling urban expansion and protecting farmland, such as the land use master plan (LUMP) instituted by the Chinese national government. This paper studies the effectiveness of such top–down plans under the authoritarian regime through the case study of Nanjing. In contrast to previous studies that compare actual and planned land-use maps, we compare actual and planned land-use patterns. We use land-use change data to examine spatio-temporal land-use change between the years 1997 and 2014. The results indicate that the actual amount of urban-rural built-up land exceeded planned regulatory amount by 50,185 ha and the total farmland was 70,541 ha less than the target outlined in the LUMP (1997–2010). Based on these results, and the fact that the allowed total urban-rural built-up land had already been surpassed in 2014, it is to be expected that the target of farmland protection outlined in the LUMP (2006–2020) will be broken, signaling the ineffectiveness of the plan to control urban expansion and protect farmland. Plan-led developments (e.g., new towns, development zones) and market forces (e.g., housing market, foreign direct investment) explain these developments. This study indicates that when cities embrace “growth-led” development and entrepreneurial governance, the ability of plans to control urban expansion and protect farmland is severely limited.

In this article, I juxtapose David Harvey’s idea of the ‘right to the city’ and Martha Nussbaum’s central human capability of ‘control over one’s environment’, and I approach them from the perspective of their mutual convergence on Marx’s conception of human significance. In particular, I compare how Marx’s conception reverberates in Harvey’s right to the city as human right and in Nussbaum’s control over the environment as central human capability. I discuss how the language of capabilities through which the latter scholar articulates her political liberalism offers ‘important supplementations’ to the language of human rights through which the former scholar articulates his critical discourse. I conclude that the evaluative character of Nussbaum’s capability approach could advance a novel stream in planning theory centred on human development. To elaborate on such potential, I propose the notion of people’s ‘urban functionings’, and I discuss how this notion could provide new interpretative lenses through which to renew the idea of ‘right to the city’.

The world is rapidly urbanising, with both positive and negative consequences. One major challenge is how to secure the long-term quality of life for urban residents. Many studies on quality of life are based on ‘material’ ecosystem services (i.e., provisioning and regulating services), with less attention paid to the non-material benefits gained from nature (e.g., green and blue spaces), which have been called cultural ecosystem services (CES). However, these non-material services are often most important to urban residents. Understanding perceptions and awareness of CES provided by urban blue space (i.e., water and wetlands) and green space (i.e., urban forest and grassland) are therefore important to support planning, creation, and protection of these spaces. To tackle these problems, we assessed and quantified the CES provided by urban green and blue space in six metropolitan areas of Beijing. By combining ecosystem services valuation with surveys (466 questionnaires and 16 expert interviews), we gained insights into residents’ perceptions of CES. Surprisingly, blue areas in metropolitan Beijing were valued at least 4.3 times higher than the value of green areas. More than 80% of the residents were willing to pay for maintenance of urban blue and green areas (an average of almost 64 RMB/year). The contributions of cultural services are likely to increase if stakeholders value natural ecosystems more in urban areas than in rural or mountainous areas because of the additional value of these rare resources in densely populated areas.

The landscape services concept provides a lens to study relations within the social-ecological networks that landscapes are, and to identify stakeholders as either providers or beneficiaries. However, landscape services can also be used as a boundary concept in collaborative landscape governance. We demonstrate this by analysing the case of Gouwe Wiericke in the rural west of the Netherlands. Here, a collaborative landscape governance process started off with low levels of trust between farmers and regional governments, as a result of previous processes. The introduction of the landscape services concept helped to bridge social boundaries, which eventually resulted in collective action: farmers and governments reached an agreement on adapted management of ditches and shores to improve water quality and biodiversity. However, we propose that bridging the social boundaries was achieved not merely due to the landscape services concept, but also due to the fact that multiple boundaries were managed simultaneously, and additional arrangements were used in boundary management.

Jane Jacobs has been a highly influential thinker in urban design and town planning debates for the past half-century. She authored publications that became classics in urban studies literature, such as The Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and left behind a number of pioneering studies on urban economics and the primacy of cities in states.In May 2016, Jane Jacobs would have had her 100th birthday. To celebrate this occasion, TU Delft and Erasmus University College Rotterdam in the Netherlands took on the challenge of organising a conference wholly dedicated to critically discussing Jane Jacobs's legacy and relevance for the twenty-first century. The organisers emphasised that this was the only academic conference in the world dedicated to Jane Jacobs. The conference attracted about 150 participants and was held in the marvellous buildings of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft. Nearly 40 presentations were divided among six parallel tracks:* Ethics and the just city;* Street spaces: history, heritage and memory;* The dynamics of neighbourhoods;* The reshaping of old urban fabrics in Chinese cities;* Organised complexity; and* Safety in the public space.Aside from this broad range of topics around the ideas of Jacobs, keynote speeches, workshops and special events, such as a 'Jane's walk' through Rotterdam, completed the programme.Keynotes: 'becoming' and reinventing Jane JacobsThe conference opened with three consecutive keynote lectures - the most notable of which, for depth and accuracy, was Peter Laurence's opening speech. Laurence's opening presentation of his book Becoming Jane Jacobs constituted the perfect introduction to a programme whose value, in a genuine Jacobsian spirit, consisted of the quality and depth of exchanges among participants who - regardless of their world views and affiliation - recognise in the American thinker an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Laurence's opening speech was rich with anecdotes, analyses and interpretations of Jacobs's life and thoughts, from her early writings as 'city journalist' up to her most comprehensive contributions as a scholar. Through his contribution, Laurence set the perfect ground for a conference that remained faithful to what Jacobs embodied in both her intellectual production and her urban activism: that it is not the sum, but rather the integration, of people's ideas, along their lifelong development, that constitutes the basis for cohesive and creative transformations of both the city and how we think about it.Professor Dirk Schubert (HafenCity University Hamburg) made a plea for contextualising Jacobs's ideas in contemporary urban planning, and critically re-evaluating such ideas. This provided a framework for critically discussing the conference theme - the legacy and relevance of Jane Jacobs in the twenty-first century - instead of being just a celebration. It was the explicit aim of the conference not only to 'celebrate' the figure of Jane Jacobs as urban activist, but to explore and critically question the value of her intellectual contributions for both contemporary and future urban planning.Arnold Reijndorp, professor of urban sociology at the University of Amsterdam, was the third keynote speaker. He explored how critical reflections on the ideas of Jacobs should take place, by referring to examples from the Netherlands. These three keynote speakers complemented each other and set the scene for the other discussions throughout the conference.Academic, activist or a symbol of women's emancipation?On a not-too-marginal note, the three opening keynote lectures dedicated to Jacobs's legacy also caused a reaction by Delft University's students. In the main conference room, two rows of chairs sat empty and displayed the names of female scholars who had not been considered as possible keynote speakers. …

Natural areas are essential for species conservation and outdoor recreation. Where conservation and recreational values are under threat, site managers need to take measures to protect them. Scientific knowledge and tools might help them to predict the outcomes of planned measures and create support amongst stakeholders. To be accepted by all stakeholders the knowledge and tools must possess three attributes credibility, salience and legitimacy. In this PhD thesis existing scientific knowledge and tools were made context-specific and local measures were related to regional conservation targets for different study areas in the UK, Netherlands and France. The process of integrating site-specific data and local knowledge in the tools helps stakeholders explain their view of the local context and increases the salience and legitimacy of the knowledge and tools while their credibility is maintained. This leads to a co-learning process between recreation stakeholders, conservation stakeholders, managers and scientists where measures are supported by all parties involved.

The Dutch planning system has been widely feted as a coordinated, ‘plan-led’ and evidence-informed system that has been successfully implemented, resulting in sensitive land management, an absence of urban sprawl and the protection of ‘green areas’. However, at least since the 1970s, the reality has been somewhat different. This paper reviews Dutch planning history over the past fifty years to highlight in particular the challenge of implementation. The paper also reviews the current challenges facing Dutch planners and provides some international reflection from Dutch experiences for Irish planners.

An in-depth understanding of these stimuli is currently lacking in literature as most research has focussed on overcoming barriers to climate adaptation. The aim of this paper is to identify stimuli for municipal responses to climate adaptation and examine how they influence the governance approach to addressing climate adaptation through explorative case study research. Fort this, an early adapter was selected as case: Philadelphia (USA). By reconstructing the organization of two municipal responses to climate adaptation in this city, we have been able to identify stimuli and gain insight in the city’s governance approach. The reconstruction is based on data triangulation that consists of semi-structured interviews with actors involved in these responses, policy documents and newspaper articles. The research illustrates the importance of stimuli such as strategically framing climate adaptation within wider urban agendas, political leadership and institutional entrepreneurs. Moreover the research reveals that it is the combination of stimuli that influences the governance approach to climate adaptation. Some stimuli will trigger a dedicated approach to climate adaptation, while others initiate a mainstreaming approach. This research is important especially to municipalities to recognize stimuli within their own (policy) context and subsequently, make informed decisions to exploit all or some of these stimuli to initiate a governance approach to climate adaptation.

The discourse on twentieth-century urban planning has hidden from view the way religion (re)shaped the urban landscape. By analysing the interaction between urban development and Catholic politics in the southern Dutch provincial cities of Eindhoven and Roermond, this article argues that religious thinking, practice and institutions had considerable influence on urban planning. Religious views and ideas played an important role in the spatial transformation of these towns. The secular instruments of urban planning were used during the ‘pillarization’ period to emphasize the sensus catholicus of town and region, and to achieve the desired Catholic social and moral order.

In their daily surroundings, people perpetually produce heritage, as they experience, assign meaning to and act upon local historical landscape features. We conducted a case study in a peat district in the Netherlands to investigate heritage construction in various local landscape practices. These practices reflected distinctive patterns of routinised activities, motives to engage with these activities, historical landscape artefacts that are deemed valuable and meanings assigned to these artefacts. Across these landscape practices, we identified different modes of producing heritage meanings: (a) driven by landscape aesthetics, (b) framed by potential spatial threats, (c) structured by family roots, and (d) generated by the desire to belong to the community. Our study demonstrates that heritage production can vary a lot even within a relatively homogenous local culture. In addition, our results suggest that heritage is sometimes produced implicitly, rather than explicitly.

Many studies have addressed the justice of public land acquisition, but few studies have addressed the question of what landowners perceive as just. Individual perceptions drive an important part of the social and scientific debates on legitimate and just land acquisition. This article addresses this gap by studying landowners’ and land purchasers’ perceptions of just land acquisition. We did this by uncovering the prevailing discourse on just land acquisition and studying the values that shaped people’s perceptions of just land acquisition. The results showed that perceptions of justice are based on the values of lawfulness, decentness and equality. These values were translated into different norms that resulted in expectations pertaining to just land acquisition. Insight into the different perceptions and the prevailing discourse of just land acquisition and their underlying values increases the understanding of land acquisition processes and land policy strategies. First, it becomes apparent that land acquisition has an essential element of injustice that cannot be avoided by a good process or a just compensation fee. Second, insight in different discourses provides valuable input for debates on just land acquisition. Third, such insight shows that money is not always a sufficient means of indemnification. The combination of sufficient financial compensation, the opportunity of a new location, attractive selling conditions and accurate and open process are all important requisites to ensure that public land acquisition is perceived by the majority of landowners as just.

The need for more comparisons among models is widely recognized. This study aimed to compare three different modelling approaches for their capability to simulate and predict trends and patterns of winter wheat yield in Western Germany. The three modelling approaches included an empirical model, a process-based model (LINTUL2), and a metamodel derived from the process-based model. The models outcomes were aggregated to general climate zones level of Western Germany to allow for a comparison with agricultural census data for validation purposes. The spatial patterns and temporal trends of winter wheat yield seemed to be better represented by the empirical model (R2= 70%, RMSE= 0.48 t ha-1 yr-1, and CV-RMSE= 8%) than by the LINTUL2 model (R2= 65%, RMSE= 0.67 t ha-1 yr-1, and CV-RMSE=11%) and the metamodel (R2= 57%, RMSE= 0.77 t ha-1 yr-1, and CV-RMSE=13%). All models demonstrated a similar order of magnitude of yield prediction and associated uncertainties. The suitability of the three models is context dependent. Empirical modelling is most suitable to analyze and project past and current crop-yield patterns, while crop growth simulation models are more suited for future projections with climate scenarios. The derived metamodels are fast reliable alternatives for areas with well calibrated crop growth simulation models. A model comparison helps to reveal shortcomings and strengths of the models. In our case, a performance comparison between the three modelling approaches indicated that, for simulating winter wheat growth in Western Germany, higher sensitivity to soil depth and lower sensitivity to drought in the LINTUL2 model would probably lead to better predictions.

Green spaces provide a variety of benefits that contribute to morehealthy and attractive cities. This paper, building upon results of the EUFP7 GREEN SURGE project, aims to identify, describe and categorize innovativeparticipatory governance practices characterized by non-governmentalactor involvement in the maintenance, decision-making or managementof urban green spaces. A total of 20 cities in 14 EU-countries werestudied and for each of these, information on participatory governancearrangements was acquired using a multi-method approach. This was acombination of: a) semi-structured interviews with green space planningcity officials, b) desk studies, and c) analysis of planning documents withrelevance to urban green space. We identified four broad trends influencingparticipatory governance policies and practices in the EU, and wecategorized participatory governance practices relating to urban greenspaces into seven clusters. To capture and compare between differentcities and countries the different ways in which non-governmental actorsare involved in urban green space governance, we introduced a participatorygovernance matrix. The matrix has two dimensions: “mode ofgovernance” (ranging from government regulation to self-governance)and “means of participation” (ranging from more structural institutionalinfluence to influence through hands-on activities). By considering participatorygovernance practices along with trends at a European level,practitioners are provided with an improved understanding of how toharness the potential of civil society in urban green space management,now and into the future.

Devolution is advocated as a solution to scale mismatches in urban environmental governance. However, urban environmental quality is a multi-scalar issue: its various aspects – noise, soil, odour, air, water et cetera – are influenced by processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Decisions by municipal authorities that benefit local environmental quality may, therefore, conflict with higher-level environmental objectives. Managing the effects of urban development on each of these various aspects, then, is not only a matter of attributing authority to the ‘right’ jurisdictional levels; rather, it is about organizing effective interplay among these levels. This paper compares two fundamentally different ways in which such interplay has been institutionalised in the Netherlands. Two examples illustrate these approaches and show that they may lead to different results. One approach is to devolve the authority to decide about the desired environmental quality upon the municipal level. The second approach is to have local authorities and polluters comply with centrally issued standards and, meanwhile, give them more leeway to negotiate the necessary emission reductions. Whereas the former offers the desired degree of flexibility, the latter guarantees that objectives are achieved. It is from the trade-off between flexibility and legal certainty that the choice for either of these approaches results. This paper contributes to the scientific debate on managing urban environmental quality in a multi-level governance context by demonstrating how the two approaches work out in practice and what their advantages and disadvantages are. The paper very preliminary judges the two approaches and suggests a third one combining the advantages of both.

Informational governance is a relatively new analytical concept explaining societal changes appearing in the Information Age, resulting from the massive new patterns of information flows. The main aim of this review is to identify the emerging issues in this new interdisciplinary field of science, within the context of environmental sustainability. Besides the existing literature on informational governance, new scientific contributions provided by this special issue are reviewed. The informational governance concept particularly contributes to analysing the rationale of the new patterns of information flows into the governance literature, and to gaining insights in how and why actors and institutions see their authorities being transformed into new arrangements. On the basis of the contributions to this special issue we specify future research topics in areas: information construction in policy processes, new relationships, transparency implications in environmental governance, new global arrangements and public engagement in the Information Age.

De ‘triomf van de stad’ gaat voorbij aan kleinere en middelgrote steden en armerestedelijke bevolkingsgroepen. Door de toegenomen ongelijkheid tussen én binnensteden wordt de vraag naar de gewenste toekomst van de stad steeds relevanter.Stedelijk succes wordt steeds meer bepaald door een enthousiasmerend, inclusief en mobiliserend sociaal-cultureel programma.

In recent decades the intensification of agricultural production in many European countries has been one of the key components of land-use change. The impact of agricultural intensification varies according to national and local contexts and a greater understanding of the drivers of intensification will help to mitigate against its negative impacts and harness potential benefits. This paper analyses changes in land use intensity in six case studies in Europe. A total of 437 landowners were interviewed and their responses were analysed in relation to changes in land use intensity and agricultural production between 2001 and 2011. In the case studies in Western and Eastern Europe we observed stabilisation during the last decade, and no clear tendency of increase or decrease of land use intensity. The use of fertilizers and pesticides seems to have decreased in our cases in Western Europe, which is contrary to trends in Eastern Europe. Agricultural production remained stable in almost all cases, except for an increase in Austria and Romania which may indicate that the farming efficiency has increased. A statistical analysis showed a division between study areas in Romania and Austria (increasing land use intensity) versus those in the Netherlands, Denmark and Greece (decreasing). In the Mediterranean cases we observe a process where agriculture is becoming increasingly marginalised, at the same time as changes in function with regard to urbanisation and recreational land uses have taken place. Logistic regression highlighted the importance of farm size and farmer type in understanding changes in land use intensity. The dominant pattern of stabilisation which has occurred over the past 10 years may also partly be a result of effective EU and national environmental and agricultural policies, which are increasingly concerned with improving environmental conditions in rural areas.

In this special issue, landscapes are conceptualized as social-ecological systems resulting from the interaction between societal and natural processes. Landscapes produce services and values to stakeholders that share a particular geographical area. In view of landscape sustainability, these stakeholders have common responsibilities to retain the functioning of landscapes to service future generations. Also, because demands for landscape services overlap and require landscape wide management, users and owners of the landscape have common interests in creating added value and organizing landscape wide coordination of interventions. This interdependency calls for collaborative management, but is also a cause of conflicts. From the point of view of scientific support, there is a need for interdisciplinary and solution-oriented approaches that foster collaboration. This special issue presents innovative interdisciplinary approaches that illustrate the main challenges for science to support community-based landscape governance.

Land transactions between farmers are responsible for landscape changes in rural areas. The price a farmer is willing to pay (WTP) for vacant land depends on the distance of the parcel to the farmstead. Detailed quantitative knowledge of this WTP– distance relationship is of utmost importance for accurate modelling of land markets, and for the design and implementation of effective and robust land consolidation schemes. Practical experience suggests, however that it is not particularly easy to back out the WTP–distance relationship from empirical transaction data. Here, we present a novel statistical framework to help quantify the relationship between a farmer’s WTP and the distance of his/her farmstead to the vacant parcel. We describe a land market with a simple statistical model and simulate an artificial archive of land transactions via Monte Carlo sampling. The parameters of our virtual market are estimated from a historical archive of land transactions in the Province of Gelderland The Netherlands, using minimization of the divergence (relative entropy) between the observed and simulated joint distributions of distance and transaction price. A reasonable agreement was observed between the observed and simulated bivariate distributions of distance and transaction price. Our results demonstrate that for short distances (500–1000m) any additional metre distance reduces the WTP by about 60 € ha-1. The impact of distance on WTP gradually levels off with larger distance: beyond 5 km the effect has reduced to less than 0.5 € ha-1

This chapter seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of the role of property rights in society and to consider how these may be rebalanced in the public interest by examining some historical insights and contemporary actions. It explores the ongoing land reforms in Scotland that seek the sage use of land for the collective well-being of Scotland. The chapter describes the importance of historical experiences in establishing private property as the conventional, accepted, and normal customs and conventions, the nature of the formal rules of the game that establish and sustain the perceived legitimacy of private property. It draws the broad logics of new institutionalism to better understand the challenging nature of the land question. The land reforms being devised and implemented in Scotland seek to promote and enable a more inclusive public interest in the land question. The different measures reflect to a large extent the historical provenance of land reforms and agendas in Scotland.

Within a public perspective on land policies, land banking of regional authorities is a very special instrument, as it links spatial policymaking directly to its implementation. Therewith, it is greatly increasing the effectiveness of spatial policymaking. Yet, its effectiveness also depends upon its specific context. It will be made clear that the potential of land banking for the implementation of regional spatial policies is enormous, especially in the Netherlands, for it adds a powerful instrument, rooted in private law, to the regional spatial planning toolkit. Traditionally, the Dutch provinces played an important role in regional spatial developments, using instruments based on public law. Nowadays, however, they are also getting more and more involved as an active (private) player on regional land markets as well. Analytically, these two roles create many controversies as public and private interests of provinces tend to mix. This results in controversies in terms of effectiveness (including efficiency) and legitimacy. Both theoretically as well as empirically, the controversies can be reduced into three tension areas, concerning (1) rationales for regional land policies, (2) conflicts of interests with municipalities, and (3) inflation of land prices.

In advanced, capitalist economies planning serves a critical enabling purpose. It protects private property rights, allows for democratic engagement in setting priorities for land policy and seeks to secure the wider public interest in land use and development. Yet it is severely criticised by diverse sets of interests. The chapter argues that society has forgotten the provenance of planning – its origins, its intellectual design. This is exacerbated by the normalisation of neoliberal thinking and the setting of new limits to planning under private property regimes.

Current concepts that aim to align economic development with sustainability, such as the circular and green economy, often consider natural systems as externalities. We extend the green economy concept by including the landscape as the provider of social, economic and environmental values. Our aim is to explore how companies could engage in creating landscape-inclusive solutions for sustainable landscapes. We propose a conceptual model of the relationship between companies and landscape services based on a demand for landscape benefits by companies, implications for wider society. We present a short overview of how scientists addressed the role of companies in landscape-inclusive solutions. We also give some examples taken from the World Wide Web to illustrate the variety of ways in which companies already invest in landscape services. Our findings suggest that the relationship between companies and landscapes is not yet strongly recognized in sustainability science. However, examples from practice show that some companies do recognize the added values of landscape services, to the extent that they invest in landscape management. We conclude that future research should provide information on the added value of landscape-inclusive solutions to companies, and increase their capacity to engage in regional social–ecological networks.

While landscape ecology is distinct from sustainability science, landscape ecologists have expressed their ambitions to help society advance sustainability of landscapes. In this context Wu (2013) coined the concept of landscape sustainability science. In August of 2017 we joined the 5th forum of landscape sustainability science in Beijing (see http://leml.asu.edu/chess/FLSS/05/index.html). To inspire landscape ecologists in developing research for a more sustainable future, we highlight some of the key points raised there. We emphasize challenges that have been identified in sustainability science that we consider particularly relevant for landscape sustainability. Then we describe how landscape ecology could enrich sustainability science. Finally, we propose five topics for landscape ecology research to advance landscape sustainability science.

This chapter seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of the role of property rights in society and to consider how these may be rebalanced in the public interest by examining some historical insights and contemporary actions. It explores the ongoing land reforms in Scotland that seek the sage use of land for the collective well-being of Scotland. The chapter describes the importance of historical experiences in establishing private property as the conventional, accepted, and normal customs and conventions, the nature of the formal rules of the game that establish and sustain the perceived legitimacy of private property. It draws the broad logics of new institutionalism to better understand the challenging nature of the land question. The land reforms being devised and implemented in Scotland seek to promote and enable a more inclusive public interest in the land question. The different measures reflect to a large extent the historical provenance of land reforms and agendas in Scotland.

In advanced, capitalist economies planning serves a critical enabling purpose. It protects private property rights, allows for democratic engagement in setting priorities for land policy and seeks to secure the wider public interest in land use and development. Yet it is severely criticised by diverse sets of interests. The chapter argues that society has forgotten the provenance of planning – its origins, its intellectual design. This is exacerbated by the normalisation of neoliberal thinking and the setting of new limits to planning under private property regimes.

Urbanization represents a challenge for plans aimed at controlling urban expansion and protecting farmland, such as the land use master plan (LUMP) instituted by the Chinese national government. This paper studies the effectiveness of such top–down plans under the authoritarian regime through the case study of Nanjing. In contrast to previous studies that compare actual and planned land-use maps, we compare actual and planned land-use patterns. We use land-use change data to examine spatio-temporal land-use change between the years 1997 and 2014. The results indicate that the actual amount of urban-rural built-up land exceeded planned regulatory amount by 50,185 ha and the total farmland was 70,541 ha less than the target outlined in the LUMP (1997–2010). Based on these results, and the fact that the allowed total urban-rural built-up land had already been surpassed in 2014, it is to be expected that the target of farmland protection outlined in the LUMP (2006–2020) will be broken, signaling the ineffectiveness of the plan to control urban expansion and protect farmland. Plan-led developments (e.g., new towns, development zones) and market forces (e.g., housing market, foreign direct investment) explain these developments. This study indicates that when cities embrace “growth-led” development and entrepreneurial governance, the ability of plans to control urban expansion and protect farmland is severely limited.

The use of agent-based modelling approaches in ex-post and ex-ante evaluations of agricultural policies has been progressively increasing over the last few years. There are now a sufficient number of models that it is worth taking stock of the way these models have been developed. Here, we review 20 agricultural agent-based models (ABM) addressing heterogeneous decision-making processes in the context of European agriculture. The goals of this review were to i) develop a framework describing aspects of farmers' decision-making that are relevant from a farm-systems perspective, ii) reveal the current state-of-the-art in representing farmers' decision-making in the European agricultural sector, and iii) provide a critical reflection of underdeveloped research areas and on future opportunities in modelling decision-making. To compare different approaches in modelling farmers' behaviour, we focused on the European agricultural sector, which presents a specific character with its family farms, its single market and the common agricultural policy (CAP). We identified several key properties of farmers' decision-making: the multi-output nature of production; the importance of non-agricultural activities; heterogeneous household and family characteristics; and the need for concurrent short- and long-term decision-making. These properties were then used to define levels and types of decision-making mechanisms to structure a literature review. We find most models are sophisticated in the representation of farm exit and entry decisions, as well as the representation of long-term decisions and the consideration of farming styles or types using farm typologies. Considerably fewer attempts to model farmers' emotions, values, learning, risk and uncertainty or social interactions occur in the different case studies. We conclude that there is considerable scope to improve diversity in representation of decision-making and the integration of social interactions in agricultural agent-based modelling approaches by combining existing modelling approaches and promoting model inter-comparisons. Thus, this review provides a valuable entry point for agent-based modellers, agricultural systems modellers and data driven social scientists for the re-use and sharing of model components, code and data. An intensified dialogue could fertilize more coordinated and purposeful combinations and comparisons of ABM and other modelling approaches as well as better reconciliation of empirical data and theoretical foundations, which ultimately are key to developing improved models of agricultural systems.

The strategic use of scarce environmental resources is clearly a matter of societal concern. Certain features of the land resource differentiate it from, say, air or water, since land is relatively fixed and finite in nature. Land also varies in terms of its inherent desirable qualities, such as its location, accessibility, productivity, or cultural meaning. Planning goals, and the means deemed to be appropriate and just by which to implement political or state objectives, likewise vary.

Within a public perspective on land policies, land banking of regional authorities is a very special instrument, as it links spatial policymaking directly to its implementation. Therewith, it is greatly increasing the effectiveness of spatial policymaking. Yet, its effectiveness also depends upon its specific context. It will be made clear that the potential of land banking for the implementation of regional spatial policies is enormous, especially in the Netherlands, for it adds a powerful instrument, rooted in private law, to the regional spatial planning toolkit. Traditionally, the Dutch provinces played an important role in regional spatial developments, using instruments based on public law. Nowadays, however, they are also getting more and more involved as an active (private) player on regional land markets as well. Analytically, these two roles create many controversies as public and private interests of provinces tend to mix. This results in controversies in terms of effectiveness (including efficiency) and legitimacy. Both theoretically as well as empirically, the controversies can be reduced into three tension areas, concerning (1) rationales for regional land policies, (2) conflicts of interests with municipalities, and (3) inflation of land prices.