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Gathering and managing requirements from stakeholders is an essential task for the successful development of IT tools for any application domain. However, specifying stakeholders’ requirements for a collaborative research and development project in the urban management domain is especially challenging. The reason for this is that stakeholders are drawn from different professional, scientific and national backgrounds and contexts, and therefore have various and differing research, technological and application domain-specific objectives. These challenges make it difficult to identify commonalities in requirements that can result in the development of generic IT tools which can be applied in other cities. These various challenges make it highly desirable therefore to identify and apply a coherent methodological approach to the management of the requirements gathering process and stakeholder engagement more generally. In this paper, we introduce a coherent methodology and a generic requirements engineering process, namely – ‘CoReS – Collaborative Requirements Engineering and Stakeholder engagement’. This process is applied to the UrbanAPI-project - a collaborative research project, in which eleven partners from six European countries are collaborating to develop IT tools to support policy making, urban planning and participatory governance at different urban scales. The CoReS method results in the identification of commonalities in stakeholder requirements from four major cities located in different EU member states with the objective to develop generic IT tools and applications. More specifically, this paper reports on the urban planning issues and needs for generic IT tools. In addition, it presents strengths and weaknesses of the CoReS method applied in the UrbanAPI project. Furthermore, it is argued that this experience can effectively support the specification of a roadmap in defining the requirements for the development of IT tools for decision support in the urban planning domain, that can be applied to a wide range of cities throughout Europe.

An important driving force behind urban expansion is the growth of the urban population. But for Europe, this is not a sufficient explanation. The major trend is that European cities have become much less compact. Since the mid-1950s European cities have expanded on average by 78%, whereas the population has grown by only 33%. In the PLUREL project - an integrated project within the EU’s 6th Research Framework Programme - more than 100 researchers from 15 countries analysed the impacts of urban land consumption at a pan-European level and, through six European and one Chinese case studies, identified how land use conflicts and the pressure towards peri-urban areas can be strategically managed in different development and regulatory contexts. To summarise, the following strategies were identified as important steps towards more sustainable urban-rural futures: (i) better coordination of transport, land use and open space planning; (ii) urban containment and densification – development of a green compact city; (iii) preservation of blue and green infrastructure; and (iv) preservation of agricultural land and the promotion of local production. The need also remains to strengthen governance at the regional level while at the pan-European level there is clearly a need for more policy attention to be given to urban-rural linkages.

International audience; An important driving force behind urban expansion is the growth of the urban population. But for Europe, this is not a sufficient explanation. The major trend is that European cities have become much less compact. Since the mid-1950s European cities have expanded on average by 78%, whereas the population has grown by only 33%. In the PLUREL project - an integrated project within the EU's 6th Research Framework Programme - more than 100 researchers from 15 countries analysed the impacts of urban land consumption at a pan-European level and, through six European and one Chinese case studies, identified how land use conflicts and the pressure towards peri-urban areas can be strategically managed in different development and regulatory contexts. To summarise, the following strategies were identified as important steps towards more sustainable urban-rural futures: (i) better coordination of transport, land use and open space planning; (ii) urban containment and densification - development of a green compact city; (iii) preservation of blue and green infrastructure; and (iv) preservation of agricultural land and the promotion of local production. The need also remains to strengthen governance at the regional level while at the pan-European level there is clearly a need for more policy attention to be given to urban-rural linkages.

Recent uneven land use dynamics in urban areas resulting from demographic change, economic pressure and the cities' mutual competition in a globalising world challenge both scientists and practitioners, among them social scientists, modellers and spatial planners. Processes of growth and decline specifically affect the urban environment, the requirements of the residents on social and natural resources. Social and environmental research is interested in a better understanding and ways of explaining the interactions between society and landscape in urban areas. And it is also needed for making life in cities attractive, secure and affordable within or despite of uneven dynamics. The position paper upon "Actors and factors - bridging social science findings and urban land use change modeling" presents approaches and ideas on how social science findings on the interaction of the social system (actors) and the land use (factors) are taken up and formalised using modelling and gaming techniques. It should be understood as a first sketch compiling major challenges and proposing exemplary solutions in the field of interest.