From knowledge to action: Bridging the gaps toward effective incorporation of Landscape Character Assessment approach in land-use planning and management in Israel

Although Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) has gained a significant recognition around the globe, the understanding of the challenges faced by planners and decision- makers in incorporating LCA processes and outputs in land-use planning remains insufficient. This paper presents a snapshot of the barriers to effective LCA-based land-use planning in Israel, with regard to four distinct phases of the process: (a) the knowledge development phase, i.e., the formulation of a credible LCA approach; (b) the approach adoption phase, i.e., the willingness to incorporate LCA processes and outputs into land-use planning; (c) the knowledge transfer phase, i.e., the actual incorporation of LCA outputs into land-use planning; and (d) the application management phase, i.e., the transition of LCA- based plans into action. To investigate the barriers, the study combines a literature review with thematic analysis of eight Israeli LCA-based land-use plans from all planning levels, and individual in-depth interviews with 35 senior planners and decision makers involved in the design and implementation of these plans. The study reveals that within the general trajectory of mainstreaming LCA approach in Israel over the past two and a half decades, significant gaps exist between LCA knowledge, LCA-based land-use planning, and on- ground action and results. The extent of the gaps differs across plans and planning scales. The gaps are rooted in the complexity of the LCA approach; language barriers; scientific and technical limitations; inconsistency and subjectivity; different academic, planning, and decision-making traditions; limited institutional capacity; vagueness and over-flexibility of approved LCA-based planning principles and instructions; and lack of sufficient involvement by stakeholders. This paper offers suggestions as to how these gaps might be bridged in the Israeli context. In conclusion, the study recommends the following: developing a legally binding, generic, credible, and continuously updated LCA-based planning guide, that should be written in the native language; establishing a national and comprehensive free-access online information center for sharing LCA knowledge; strengthening of institutional capacities at all planning levels; enhancing planners' and consultants' LCA skills; and inclusion of all affected stakeholders in the process.Broadening the understanding of the obstacles and solutions to effective application of LCA processes and outputs in land-use planning and management practices can contribute to operationalizing this approach in various contexts and eventually, advance the reduction of anthropogenic pressures on valuable landscapes.     

Certain flexibilities in land-use plans Towards a method for assessing flexibility

The trade-off between flexibility and legal certainty is inherent in every planning system. This trade-off is especially apparent within a land-use plan. Flexibility and legal certainty are often seen as communicating vessels: the demise of one leads to an increase in the other. Within land-use plans, however, the connection between the two is more subtle. For a land-use plan, the choice between being specific or open, and rigid or adaptable, determine the amount of flexibility. With these choices a land-use plan can increase its flexibility without decreasing legal certainty. Within reason the legal certainty can even benefit from more flexibility. However, current academic literature lacks a structured way to analyse flexibility contained within a land-use plan. Such a method is necessary for analysing and comparing different land-use plans. This paper will provide such a method and analyse thirteen different land-use plans in the Netherlands on their flexibility. It will show that a structured method can prove to be useful for analysing and comparing different land-use plans. The research provides insight into the complex balance between flexibility and legal certainty and presents an assessment tool which can be used for further academic research.     

Losing faith in planning

Israeli planning is at a crossroad, and not for the first time. As the housing crisis is coupled with a traffic and transportation catastrophe, the planning system is desperate to create new tools and invent new procedures for speeding up plan- and decision-making. A deep look at the performance of planning in Israel reveals that the abundance of short-cuts, circumventions and detours are actually a reflection of the loss of faith in the essence of planning. Particularly, when taking into account two major setbacks: the complete lack of agreeable (spatial) planning principles at all levels of planning, and the congruence between planning institutions and other governmental bodies. These flaws, stemming from the modernist origins of Israeli Planning, continuously erode the practice of planning. Planning institutions are therefore the first to ignore, cancel and evade approved plans and declared policies, which affects other governmental authorities. The result is the practical abandonment of the belief in planning's ability to bring about positive change and a dangerously weakened planning system.     

Between the rule of law and the quest for control: Legal certainty in the Dutch planning system

At the heart of every planning system lies the trade-off between flexibility and legal certainty. Every system has a bit of both. Systems such as the English put more emphasis on flexibility, whereas the American and the French seem to value legal certainty more highly. The Netherlands is part of the same Napoleonic legal family as France. However, in the Netherlands, planning practice seems to be more flexible than the general perception of the Dutch planning system. Many developments deviate from the legally binding land-use plan. Therefore, such a plan does not provide much legal certainty. On 1 July 2008, the new Dutch Spatial Planning Act came into effect. One of its most important objectives is instating the land-use plan as the central decision framework. Both the steering and the safeguarding function – the legal certainty – are meant to be strengthened. Therefore, the frequently grant exemptions must be reduced. However, it seems that the ‘erosion’ of the land-use plan has a more fundamental origin in Dutch planning culture. Based on empirical evidence of the use of the previous planning system, this paper states that steering ambitions of Dutch municipalities, rather than the system as such, have caused land-use plans – with their main focus on recording spatial development afterwards – to become overly detailed and easily outdated. The quest for control and the rule of law seem to be antagonists; one can only exist at the expense of the other.     

Spatial plans as relational data: Using social network analysis to assess consistency among Bucharest’s planning instruments

Globally, planning instruments help shape the development of places under uncertain future conditions. In the context of a multi-level planning system, both land-use and strategic spatial plans are available, mandated by different policies and adopted by various authorities. Notwithstanding the excellent support consistency among such plans can provide for their transformative capacity, studies analyzing how plans interact, forming complex relationships, are rare. Treating plans as relational data gives insights into the outcomes acquired by a network compared to the transformations enabled by a single plan. As the theory of networks prevails for handling relational data, we applied social network analysis to evaluate external consistency among 10 plans of Bucharest, Romania and the surrounding region. All plans are currently in force, have spatial implications, and refer to different administrative levels and sectors, from the metropolitan to the sub-district level and from land-use and transportation to environmental plans. We first developed a framework for consistency assessment, covering four categories of external consistency. Second, following these categories, we extracted relevant plan statements from all plans. Third, we assigned one-way, symmetrical and contradictory relationships between the plan statements. Fourth, using directed and valued network analyses we assessed consistencies, inconsistencies and contradictions between plans. Finally, we validated the results by applying questionnaires to local experts. Our results indicate that consistency among Bucharest’s plans is high on a temporal scale regarding issues and general measures, but low for spatialized planning intentions on both vertical and horizontal scales. We discuss consequences of these findings for the transformative capacity of plans and the effectiveness of plan-implementation.     

Selective rescaling,inequality and popular growth coalitions: The case of the Israeli national plan for earthquake preparedness

What happens when a government decides to up-zone an entire country and give apartment owners nationwide incentives to upgrade their homes? Can such a plan benefit everyone? What happens when it does not? We discuss these questions by analyzing TAMA 38, a nationwide statutory plan approved in Israel in 2005. With this plan, the central government encourages apartment owners of older buildings (built before 1980) to make them earthquake-ready by giving them options to add floors and space, and to cooperate with developers who will renovate the properties. The plan is a strictly entrepreneurial undertaking that depends entirely on land values and private market actors. At the same time, to expedite the implementation of the policy, the central government performed a bold scalar jump, bypassing both local and district planning levels and allowing owners to acquire building permits regardless of local plans, conditions, and regulations. We discuss this plan in light of the literature on rescaling in planning. Scholars show that following decades of growing neoliberal decentralization, various central governments are now advocating a variety of centralized-decentralized policies that bypass local decision-making and/or strategically blur national, district, and local planning scales. As in the case of TAMA 38, such methods perpetuate the neoliberal dependence on market agents, and prioritize specific actors, places and projects. By analyzing the implementation of this policy, we show how such methods create uneven development and power conflicts between actors from different planning tiers. Ultimately, we demonstrate that regardless of nationwide goals of earthquake preparedness, planners focus on central locations and affluent actors, while meaningful questions about equality and scale are sidestepped and ultimately forgotten.     

Compliance of land cover changes with municipal land use planning: Evidence from the Lisbon metropolitan region (1990–2007)

In the past few decades, urbanisation has become a major phenomenon in European cities, thus representing one of the key human land cover changes with socio-economic and environmental impacts. In the Lisbon metropolitan region it is estimated that 17% of natural and farmland have been transformed into artificial areas. Since the end of 1990s, specific EU guidelines have been issued to contain urban sprawl and preserve agricultural land. Spatial planning in Portugal obviously is integrating these assumptions into the statutory land-use master plans. But what is the performance of this land use planning system regarding land cover evolution itself? Based on the Lisbon metropolitan region (LMR), one of the major areas of urban growth in Portugal, we examine spatio-temporal land cover patterns between 1990 and 2007 by integrating cross-matrix analysis, spatial metrics, and gradient analysis. Additionally, we overlay these land cover dynamics with municipal master plans that regulate land development in order to assess the compliance levels of this land-use regulatory system. Results indicate that: artificial areas are growing by coalescence and/or by scattered development along an urban–rural gradient; agricultural land is reducing and fragmentation is increasing to enlarge peri-urban spaces; there are high levels of conversion of agricultural land into urban land in protected areas, thus showing a lack of compliance to the land use regulatory system visible in the existing gaps between the original land-use assignments of the master plan and the actual developments.     

To populate or preserve? Evolving political-demographic and environmental paradigms in Israeli land-use policy

There has been a recent proliferation of national land-use policies that emphasize protecting open space and ecosystem integrity. However, countries grappling with internal political conflict, or that are engaged in military conflicts with neighboring countries, have priorities that focus on control of land in areas where state sovereignty is perceived to be threatened. These two concerns, political-demographic control and environmental protection, create very different paradigms for how to think about open space policy. The objective of this paper is to consider the impact of competing paradigms in land-use policy formulation and implementation—one that encourages sprawl and the other that encourages compact development and the preservation of open space. We use Israel as a case study where both political demography and environmental land-use paradigms are currently influencing policy and planning. We explore the historical evolution of both land-use paradigms and consider how they are currently competing in the formulation and execution of land-use policy decisions. We consider how these distinct priorities are playing out in current discourse and policy implementation, and characterize the past, current and prospective future physical outcomes of policies on the landscape. Our goal is to alert policy makers and land-use scholars of the subtle and contradictory influence of political-demographic land-use priorities with regard to their potential impact on the successful implementation of environmental policies. The Israeli case study is indicative of a diversity of countries that have a history of political-demographic land-use policies, but have also begun to adopt environmentally motivated policies.     

A cellular automata-based land-use model as an integrated spatial decision support system for urban planning in developing cities: The case of the Bogotá region

Bogotá and the 17 neighboring municipalities make up one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Latin America. However, despite strong functional interactions within the area, there is no official government body at this level in charge of coordinating authorities and providing solutions to the wide variety of issues arising in the regional urban land system. Aiming at providing an insight on future land-use developments linked to new transport infrastructures and at offering a tool to support territorial decision-making, this paper presents a cellular automata-based (CA) model based in Metronamica® software, that allows testing different scenarios based on potential land-use policies, environmental suitability and transport alternatives.There has not been, so far, an urban planning tool that accounts for the complexities of this region. CA-based land-use simulations constitute a useful approach to understanding the impacts of urban planning policies and regulations. This tool can help to improve inter-territorial and inter-institutional coordination, which through planning and management policies seek a spatially integrated development, with a long-term perspective.The CA-based model proposed was calibrated to reproduce land-use changes between 2007 and 2016 using different methods and indicators. The model was used to simulate and analyze eight scenarios with different policy directions of transport infrastructure in the future of the region. The results of the simulations reflect the dynamics of territorial occupation. The calibration indices in the experiment indicate a high degree of suitability for the CA Bogotá model, proving its effectiveness and potential as a useful tool for decision-making. The results show that occupation scenarios with restricted developable zones within the city, tend to have the greater dispersion rate in the study area, compared to scenarios where land development plans are promoted in Bogotá, which representing a more compact development.     

Patterns of development and conservation in agricultural lands—The case of the Tel Aviv metropolitan region 1990–2000

Until the 1990s Israel was implementing a strict agricultural land preservation policy program, rooted in Zionist ideology. This was changed when shifts in Israeli planning and land policy towards the end of the 20th century brought about accelerated growth and sprawling development in agricultural lands at the urban–rural fringe, particularly in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region (TMR). In this article we describe the background for policy shifts and the resulting impact on metropolitan growth, and then proceed to identify patterns of development in former agricultural lands and their impact on conservation, based on a study of statutory land use plans converting agricultural land to built-up uses within the TMR. It was found that most of the plans were converting large tracts of agricultural land to residential uses, characterized by low-density suburban-type family housing, thus reducing considerably the spatial conservation potential. In addition, only relative small portions of land were conserved as public open space within plans’ boundaries, and even then only about half of that was actually effective for active open space uses.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of land use master plans in built-up land management: A case study of the Jinan Municipality,eastern China

China has implemented land use master plans to strictly control built-up land usage. The effective evaluation of land use master plan on controlling construction land is the premise of monitoring and early warning of planning implementation. It is also the basis for planning revision and further implementation of territorial spatial planning. In this study, we established a comprehensive index system based on three aspects: scale management, annual growth rhythm control, and spatial layout. We then analyzed the consistency between the actual situation for built-up land and the previous land use master plan of the Jinan Municipality in the Shandong Province of eastern China. The results showed that the master plan effectively controlled the scale of built-up land sprawl, such that the annual growth rhythm control level periodically increased over time. They also indicated the low efficiency of the built-up land spatial layout control. Overall, the previous land use master plan in Jinan had notable impacts. We recommend that land policy makers should adjust control standards and implementation intensity for spatial planning in the future to achieve scientific and effective planning for the management of construction land.     

An agent-based learning-embedded model (ABM-learning) for urban land use planning: A case study of residential land growth simulation in Shenzhen,China

A forward-looking urban land use plan is crucial to a city’s sustainability, which requires a deep understanding of human-environment interactions between different domains, and modelling them soundly. One of the key challenges of modelling these interactions is to understand and model how human individuals make and develop their location decisions by learning that then shape urban land-use patterns. To investigate this issue, we have constructed an extended experience-weighted attraction learning model to represent the human agents’ learning when they make location decisions. Consequently, we propose and have developed an agent-based learning-embedded model (ABM-learning) for residential land growth simulation that incorporates a learning model, a decision-making model, a land use conversion model and the constraint of urban land use master plan. The proposed model was used for a simulation of the residential land growth in Shenzhen city, China. By validating the model against empirical data, the results showed that the site-specific accuracy of the model has been improved when embedding learning model. The analysis on the simulation accuracies has proved the argument that modelling individual-level learning matters in the agent’s decision model and the agent-based models. We also applied the model to predict residential land growth in Shenzhen from 2015 to 2035, and the result can be a reference for land-use allocation in detailed planning of Shenzhen. The ABM-learning is applicable to studying the past urban growth trajectory, aiding in the formulation of detailed residential land and public service facility planning and assessing the land use planning effectiveness.     

Planning consistency and implementation in urbanizing China: Comparing urban and land use plans in suburban Beijing

The evaluation of the extent to which urban and land use planning have achieved their objectives is crucial to better management of urban land development. China’s urban and land use plans have the common purpose of controlling urban sprawl. This research aimed at comparatively assessing the consistency and implementation of these plans, considering the Changping District in suburban Beijing as a case study. Three main findings were obtained: (1) each plan used different strategies to control new developments, and there were several quantitative and spatial conflicts between the two plans; (2) neither plan has been well implemented or effective in controlling urban sprawl, despite the slightly better performance of the land use plan; (3) core-periphery decreasing trends were revealed in land quota allocation and effectiveness of planning implementation. Remote regular towns received the least land resources from the top-down planning system but also developed fast, mainly through informal and illegal approaches. Further investigation into the double failure of China’s current spatial planning system in quantitative and spatial control over urban land development requires a deeper integration of various spatial management systems, a fundamental transformation of planning philosophy, and a higher respect for peripheral areas in urban-rural integration. The planning assessment approach and reform recommendations developed on the basis of the Chinese practice are probably referable for other developing countries facing similar processes of rapid urbanization and imperfect spatial management.     

Impacts of land use and amenities on public transport use,urban planning and design

Various land-use configurations are known to have wide-ranging effects on the dynamics of and within other city components including the transportation system. In this work, we particularly focus on the complex relationship between land-use and transport offering an innovative approach to the problem by using land-use features at two differing levels of granularity (the more general land-use sector types and the more granular amenity structures) to evaluate their impact on public transit ridership in both time and space. To quantify the interdependencies, we explored three machine learning models and demonstrate that the decision tree model performs best in terms of overall performance—good predictive accuracy, generality, computational efficiency, and “interpretability”. Results also reveal that amenity-related features are better predictors than the more general ones, which suggests that high-resolution geo-information can provide more insights into the dependence of transit ridership on land-use. We then demonstrate how the developed framework can be applied to urban planning for transit-oriented development by exploring practicable scenarios based on Singapore's urban plan toward 2030, which includes the development of “regional centers” (RCs) across the city-state. Results show an initial increase in transit ridership as the amount of amenities is increased. This trend, on the other hand, eventually reverses (particularly during peak hours) with continued strategic increase in amenities; a tipping point at 55% increase is identified where ridership begins to decline and at 110%, the predicted ridership begins to fall below current levels. Our in-silico experiments support one of the medium-term land-use transport goals of stakeholders—to alleviate future strains in the transportation system of Singapore through the development of RCs. The model put forward can serve as a good foundation in building decision-support tools that can assist planners in better strategizing and planning land-use configurations, in particular the amenity resource distribution, to influence and shape public transportation demand.     

Lost in participation: How local knowledge was overlooked in land use planning and risk governance in Tōhoku,Japan

This article aims to identify gaps in public participation in land use planning to improve risk governance, using the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) in 2011. Overreliance on technical information and on the opinion of experts is occurring side by side along with negligence of local knowledge and lack of effective public participation in decision-making, creating a sense of overconfidence regarding scientific knowledge and new infrastructure's abilities to withstand future disasters. Using the case study method in GEJE, our research identified three main overall gaps in participation. Firstly, a lot of local knowledge from previous experiences was not incorporated into land use plans in the region even after similar events in the past. Secondly, there was technical information that alerted to possible risks for land use in certain areas, but this information did not impede development in risk areas due to lack of effective participation in the land use planning processes. Finally, Japan allows participation in many land use planning process, but some of the most important decisions, such as on the sitting of nuclear plants had little or any local participation. Thus, strengthening public participation in land use by closing those three gaps could improve risk governance and resilience of localities to cope with large natural and technological disasters in the future.     

Conversion of agricultural and forest land to other purposes in the context of land protection: Evidence from Polish experience

The protection of agricultural land and forests is a relatively new concept in Poland, and it began with forest protection in the 1920s. The first regulations on the protection of agricultural land were introduced only in the 1960s. Agricultural land and forests received comprehensive protection pursuant to the provisions of the Act of 26 October 1977 on the protection of agricultural land, forests and land recultivation. This legal act set the foundations for the protection of farmland and forests in successive decades.The aim of this study was to determine the influence of farmland and forest protection on spatial planning and to highlight the loss of agricultural and forest land resulting from conversion to other purposes. Legal regulations pertaining to spatial planning and the protection of agricultural and land forests were analysed. The scale of the problem was identified, and future land-use types were forecast based on the data developed by Statistics Poland (GUS). The existing spatial plans (municipal master plan - MMP) were analysed to determine the conversion loss index (CLI) associated with the conversion of agricultural land and forests to other uses. Legal regulations pertaining to the protection of agricultural land and forests were also analysed, and the extent of the relevant conversion measures was determined. The study demonstrated that urban development and the inevitable urbanization of rural areas contribute to the loss of agricultural and forest land that are converted to other uses.     

新时期土地利用规划修编的理论与方法及实施制度创新的研究

利用文献资料分析法,在分析我国土地利用规划所面临的形势和总结了1997—2010年轮次土地利用规划决策实施存在问题的基础上,提出了土地利用规划理论、方法和实施制度创新的设想,指出规划需要树立以人为本的理念、目标有限性理念和刚性与弹性规划结合等理念,注重绿色规划;规划分区应在建立新的土地分类基础上,按照土地利用规划控制方向的一致性划分土地利用区,以适用规划管理的要求;注重规划编制修改制度的规范化,提出了规划实施制度创新的设想。     

二十一世纪的国土资源规划工作

国家、省、市、县、乡(镇)五级土地利用总体规划体系不断发展和完善。市县级矿产资源规划正在全面启动,国家、省、市、县四级矿产资源规划及其专项规划构成的矿产资源规划体系也逐步形成。国土规划方面,已于2001年8月在深圳市和天津市进行试点,将遵循“试点先行,稳步推进”的原则,拟先从试点做起,逐步积累经验,然后稳步推进。编制并实施了《国土资源“十五”计划纲要》、《“十五”西部国土资源开发利用规划》、《“十五”国土资源生态建设和环境保护规划》、《国土资源部科学技术发展“十五”计划纲要》,《国土资源部“十五”干部教育培训规划》、《地籍管理“十五”计划纲要》等。目前规划中普遍存在“重编制、轻实施、缺评估、泛调整”的问题,使得规划的科学性得不到保证,从而影响国民经济和社会的健康发展。矿产资源规划包括全国矿产资源总体规划和省(自治区、直辖市)矿产资源规划、市(地)和矿产资源大县矿产资源开发利用与保护规划。“十五”期间提出的启动国土综合整治工作由于多种原因并没有真正开展起来,十六大又明确提出要“搞好国土资源综合整治”。坚持“全面规划、分步实施,突出重点,先易后难,先行试点、稳步推进”的原则,不断发挥规划在加强资源宏观管理中的重要作用。逐步建立起稳定、多元的资源保障供应体系。积极实施“引进来”与“走出去”相结合的对外开放战略。     

日韩国土规划新进展及对我国国土规划的启示

无论是日本的第六次国土规划修订,还是韩国的第四次国土规划修订,都有依法编制和实施动态性的国土规划、促进均衡国土和开放国土的建立、注重增强地方自主发展能力建设、强调规划编制过程中的公众参与等方面的特点。我国的国土规划应借鉴日、韩两国的作法,加强前期研究,推动国土规划立法;建立协调统一的国土规划体系,协调相关规划关系;开展以构建国土空间格局为主体的国土规划研究和编制工作,促进可持续发展;加强规划实施中经济手段的运用,协调政府与市场、中央与地方的关系。     

Effects of local land-use planning on development and disturbance in riparian areas

Land-use change can significantly affect the provision of ecosystem services. On a local scale, zoning laws and other land-use regulations are commonly used to influence land-use change, but their effectiveness is often unclear. We evaluate the effectiveness of local land-use planning in concentrating development and minimizing impacts in riparian areas. We use spatially-explicit land cover data from the USGS Land Cover Trends project to measure development and disturbance rates before and after implementation of Oregon’s land-use planning system. We apply a difference-in-difference estimator to address the problem of non-random assignment of regulations on the landscape. We find that land-use laws in Oregon have concentrated development inside of UGBs and lowered development rates in riparian areas. However, disturbance in riparian areas has increased inside of UGBs. Overall, our findings suggest that local land-use planning can be an effective tool for promoting the provision of non-market ecosystem services.