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Vacant land can provide social and ecological benefits to cities as they are informally used by people and spontaneously populated by animals and plant-life. However, planners and policy makers often frame vacant land as 'empty', 'blank' spaces, making it difficult to acknowledge informal and more-than-human shaping of these places. This paper demonstrates how a reconceptualization of vacant land through a relational lens enables the inclusion of informal and more-than-human placemaking in planning policy. Analysing the recent Scottish planning policy debate on vacant land through the analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews, we demonstrate that the inclusion of informal and more-than-human placemaking in the Scottish planning policy is fostered by growing recognition of concepts such as urban biodiversity, but hindered by persistent nature-culture divisions. Waymarkers for future policy making are, firstly, strengthening the presence of informal and more-than-human actors in policy debates by seeking representatives who can speak on their behalf and, secondly, supporting new placemaking traditions specifically for vacant land that are incremental and collaborative. • Concepts such as urban biodiversity support inclusion for more-than-human placemaking. • Persistent nature-culture divisions overlook interdependencies, constraining planning debates. • Inclusive planning for vacant land must counter reductivist placemaking perspectives. • Relational placemaking for vacant land should be regenerative, incremental and collaborative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do-It-Yourself urbanism has often been attributed with the capacity to revitalise urban environments in the absence of formal planning activity. However, there is still limited understanding of the ways in which such practices emerge and establish agency within their respective environments. We bring a relational lens to the debate, presenting a framework for identifying how the socio-spatial conditions within the urban landscape enable and constrain citizen-led spatial appropriation. Using a visually oriented, multi-modal approach, the framework is applied to five sites in Glasgow, Scotland, which we conceptualise as Edgelands in a post-industrial city. Findings reveal that informal citizen practices adaptively come into being through a process of negotiation with their social and material context. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for fostering citizen agency in revitalising the post-industrial city and other urban settings that include wastescapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]