Ecosystem services in spatial planning and strategic environmental assessment—A European and Portuguese profile

Despite the growing interest on ecosystem services (ES) in research, significant knowledge gaps on ES integration in decision making subsist. Particularly, ES-focused profiles of governance frameworks for different policy areas, like spatial planning, are scarce. The goal of this research is to draw a profile on ES integration in the European policy and guidance framework for spatial planning and strategic environmental assessment (SEA). To investigate how this framework might be translated in a particular country of the EU and across different levels of governance, the Portuguese spatial planning and SEA framework is also analysed. To achieve these goals, a content analysis of policy and guidance documents was conducted. We have found a general low level of explicit ES integration, but some notions associated with ES are present in the documents, although more indirectly. Results highlight the potential role of SEA for ES integration. However, in the Portuguese context, the contribution of SEA in practice is currently limited and for the coming years ES will not be specifically targeted or integrated in regional spatial planning practice. Recent changes in the wider European governance framework contribute to potentially higher degrees of ES integration in the future. Nevertheless, bottom-up demand for improved ES integration in plans and policies will be an important driver. Our approach contributes to identify which policies, plans and guiding documents need improved ES integration.     

Is spatial planning a collaborative learning process? A case study from a rural–urban gradient in Sweden

International and national policies stress the importance of spatial planning for the long-term sustainability of regions. This paper identifies the extent to which the spatial planning in a Swedish region can be characterised as a collaborative learning process. By combining qualitative interviews and systems thinking methods we analysed the main attributes of public-led spatial (i.e. comprehensive) planning in nine municipalities representing a steep urban–rural gradient in the Bergslagen region of Central Sweden. We show that the attributes of strategic spatial planning needed for collaborative learning were absent or undeveloped. All studied municipalities experienced challenges in coordinating complex issues regarding long-term planning to steer territorial development and help to solve conflicts among competing interests. Stakeholder participation was identified as a basic condition for social learning in planning. Together with stakeholders we identified the causal structure behind stakeholder participation in municipal planning processes, including main drivers and feedback loops. We conclude that there is a need for arenas allowing and promoting stakeholder activity, participation and inclusion that combines both bottom-up and top-down approaches, and where evidence-based collaborative learning can occur.     

Is PPGIS good enough? An empirical evaluation of the quality of PPGIS crowd-sourced spatial data for conservation planning

A significant barrier to the use of public participation GIS (PPGIS) and crowd-sourcing for conservation planning is uncertainty about the quality of the spatial data generated. This study examines the quality of PPGIS data for use in conservation planning. We evaluate two dimensions of spatial data quality, positional accuracy and data completeness using empirical PPGIS data from a statewide study of public lands in Victoria, Australia. Using an expert-derived spatial conservation model for Victoria as a benchmark, we quantify the performance of a crowd-sourced public in their capacity to accurately and comprehensively identify areas of high conservation importance in the PPGIS process. About 70% of PPGIS points that identified biological/conservation values were spatially coincident (position accurate) with modeled areas of high conservation importance, with greater accuracy associated with locations in existing protected areas. PPGIS data had less positional accuracy when participants identified biological values in urban areas and on non-public lands in general. The PPGIS process did not comprehensively identify all the largest, contiguous areas of high conservation importance in the state, missing about 20% of areas, primarily on small public land units in less densely populated regions of the state. Preferences for increased conservation/protection were over-represented in areas proximate to the Melbourne urban area and under-represented in more remote statewide locations. Our results indicate that if PPGIS data is to be integrated into spatial models for conservation planning, it is important to account for the spatial accuracy and completeness limitations identified in this study (i.e., urban areas, non-public lands, and smaller remote locations). The spatial accuracy and completeness of PPGIS data in this study suggests spatial data quality may be “good enough” to complement biological data in conservation planning but perhaps not good enough to overcome the mistrust associated with crowd-sourced knowledge. Recommendations to improve PPGIS data quality for prospective conservation planning applications are discussed.     

Perception and use of landscape concepts in the procedure of Environmental Impact Assessment: Case study—Switzerland and Romania

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) defines landscape as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. Because all aspects linked to landscape are evaluated during the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) procedure, we assessed the Swiss and Romanian experts’ perception and EIA reports regarding the landscape concept. Therefore, we analysed Swiss and Romanian experts’ perception of landscape, we evaluated concepts and methods used in environmental impact reports to assess landscape characteristics and functions, and how the ELC's aim and objectives are reflected by the EIA reports.The Canonical Correspondence Analysis performed to evaluate the experts’ perception of landscape integration in the EIA procedure showed a significant relationship among pattern of answers and experts’ professional background. Moreover, there is a significant difference between Swiss and Romanian expert's perception. Longer experience in the field and a higher level of education indicates higher awareness of landscape characteristics and properties, which demonstrates that alongside with the initial training, there is a need for developing a coherent long-life learning systems having landscape analysis as a focus.The ELC is familiar to nearly 86% of the Romanian Environmental Impact Assessment actors and nearly 29% of the Swiss experts. By contrast, most of the Romanian EIA reports analysed do not employ many concepts of the ELC, while most of the Swiss environmental reports incorporate objectives of landscape protection consistent with the Convention.Our study relies on the comparative investigation of representative case studies of Environmental Impact Assessment reports for industry, local infrastructures, tourism facilities, and wind farm projects, as well on tracking how the European Landscape Convention is reflected by the EIA reports. We found that EIA reports from both countries evaluate the visual landscape, thus, achieving subjective assessment of landscape aesthetics without focusing on social and ecological sub-systems. Quantitative elements of landscape analysis are mostly absent and it is challenging to evaluate whether environmental assessments are consistent among European Landscape Convention countries.To overcome the abstract way of evaluation of project's impact on landscape through EIA procedure, an improved landscape analysis procedure is needed and we propose developing technical guidelines, under the European Landscape Convention umbrella, in order to enhance landscape management.     

Application of linear programming — a case study

Summary

Linear programming deals with optimization problems that can be modelled with a linear objective function subject to a set of linear constraints. The objective of these problems is either to minimize resources for a fixed level of performance, or to maximize performance at a fixed level of resources. Among all the mathematical optimization techniques, linear programming is perhaps the most used and best understood by the business and industrial community (Aguilar, 1973).

Although many problems in architecture, engineering, construction and urban and regional development can be modelled with linear objective functions subject to sets of linear constraints, the application of linear programming in these fields is not common. By using a case problem — to find the best development option for a given site that yields the highest financial return to a developer — this paper demonstrates how this optimization technique can be applied in development projects as well as its potential contribution to decision makers in arriving at sensible and sound decisions, so that scarce urban resources can be utilized efficiently.     

Deliberation or doctrine? Land use and spatial planning for sustainable development in Sweden

Spatial planning has been earmarked as an important tool for achieving sustainable development. In Sweden the important task of planning for sustainable spatial development and land use falls largely to the local authorities, since there is no official institute for spatial planning at a national or regional level. This article investigates local planning for sustainable development by analysing recent municipal comprehensive plans, which it is argued are a major instrument for this purpose. Although comprehensive plans are statutory, their design and content is very much at local discretion, and for the most part, not a rigid process governed from above. For this reason, a template analysis was used, where the template was built from the contents of the comprehensive plans, and not from a predefined understanding of what sustainability is or how planning for sustainable development should be done. What the findings reveal, however, is that there is not much deliberation concerning the meaning(s) of sustainable development, and, further, that the planning principles considered necessary to bring about sustainable development were not exclusively regarded as sustainable as such, but rather as part of a general ‘belief system’ about prudent planning—sustainable or not. It is suggested that, rather than rethinking planning, planners have internalized the concept of sustainable planning into the existing ‘belief system,’ and thus, the planning principles have become ‘sustainable’ by default.     

Discussion of Small Town Master Planning in Yancheng City——A Case Study of Wulie town

针对盐城市小城镇总体规划现状,从内容深度、区域协调、城乡统筹、空间管制及城镇设计等角度分析解决盐城小城镇发展定位、规模和特色等问题,并尝试在五烈镇总体规划编制中加以应用,以探求盐城小城镇规划良性发展的途径所在.     

A thriving coal mining city in crisis? The governance and spatial planning challenges at Witbank,South Africa

The city of Witbank in the eMalahleni Local Government, or municipality as it is referred to in South Africa, and its economy are experiencing rapid growth. The growth is largely as a result of coal mining and associated activities such as power generation and the metal industry, which attracts an inflow of migrants to the area. The paper discusses how a flourishing city such as Witbank, with its economy based on non-renewable resources, manages its vulnerabilities. This was researched against a background of eMalahleni being placed under Administration, because the local government failed to deliver basic services. An administrator was appointed to manage and monitor the financial affairs of the local government, by the second sphere of government, known as the Provincial Administration in South Africa. The results show that Witbank prioritised mineral wealth above social, agricultural and environmental concerns. While good governance is generally important for a growing city, Witbank appears to manage with a limited contribution from the local government as the wealthier citizens are able to provide for their immediate needs or move elsewhere. It was suggested that South Africa needs to have a more balanced perspective on the costs and benefits of mining and to develop a long term vision for mining areas, which includes plans for the community once the mineral reserves are depleted.     

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.     

Administrative restructuring and land-use intensity—A spatial explicit perspective

BackgroundThe rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population explosion have ushered forth the era focusing on the efficient use of land resources to achieve sustainable development. “Intensive Land-Use Plan” was therefore proposed in the context of shifting the focus from “incremental planning” to “inventory planning” in rapidly developing countries, particularly China.MethodsWe develop our framework based on the hypothesis that administrative status has a spatial effect on intensive land use and explore this effect dynamically. In the first step, we summarized the different degrees of land-use intensity based on different administrative status (i.e., urban district, suburban district, county, county-level city, and district) and make categorizations. We also devised spatial models in multiple strategies embedded with different spatial weight matrices to the underlying driving forces using Wuhan agglomeration as the case.ResultsResults show that 1) urbanization, industrial structure, and retail sales of consumer goods are highly correlated with land-use intensity change, with all factors being positive; 2) the influences of different administrative status exist and strengthened in the past decade; the spatial interaction is greater when urban district is adjacent to district in the prefecture city in 2005 and 2015. In turn, this finding affirms the phenomenon that the administrative power has gradually strengthened, and the city centers are the most vibrant areas to compete for higher land-use efficiency.RecommendationThe emergence of diversified types of counties, such as urban districts and county-level cities, has further pressed the necessity to embed administrative influence in spatial regression. These findings provide theoretical basis for understanding the administrative dimension in new urbanization and have important policy implications on administrative adjustment and intensive land use.     

Power alliances for biodiversity—Results of an international study on community forestry

Protecting and enhancing biodiversity is one of the most important ecological goals of community forestry. Meeting this goal depends on a complex interaction of ecological as well as social and economic factors. With this paper we ask, whether the power of actors has a strong influence on the ecological outcomes of community forestry and if so, how such alliances for biodiversity look like. For empirical evidence we use our database compiled of research on 84 international community forestry cases of both developed and developing countries, taken from 2009 to 2016. The results show that the powerful actors are driving biodiversity in community forestry. With a small number of powerful actors interested in enhancing biodiversity we were able to identify only little substantial support for this goal. The widespread public announcements of biodiversity goals are mostly symbolic. Dominant information and financial incentives are the most common instruments for protecting the ecological equilibrium. This indicates a “soft” policy for biodiversity in contrast to the hard coercive instruments which protect the forest area as such. We conclude that the analysis of power can be a valuable factor in explaining the outcomes of community forestry in practice.     

The effects of growth,shrinkage, population aging and preference shifts on urban development—A spatial scenario analysis of Berlin,Germany

We observe diverse urban development trends in European cities, with processes such as population aging, growth, shrinkage, and reurbanization having unclear consequences on land use and the urban form. The effects of these processes are especially difficult to determine when they occur quickly and simultaneously. We use varying scenarios of contrasting and exceeding variants of these urban development trends to uncover possible interactions by focusing on demographic and residential preference shifts that were simulated in a previously presented land use model (Lauf et al., 2012). Using urban form indicators and landscape metrics, we determine urban to peri-urban effects. Among other interesting results, we discovered that population aging expedited by population shrinkage greatly affects land consumption. This effect is especially pronounced in the outer city due to the residential preferences of elderly people and thereby reduces urban shrinkage. In contrast, a shift in preferences toward reurbanization reduces land consumption significantly. Population aging produces synergies in terms of urban growth and landscape fragmentation and trade-offs in terms of urban shrinkage and compactness, and the opposite holds for increasing reurbanization.     

An assessment of stakeholders’ participation in land use planning process of Luapula Province Planning Authority

The legal framework of Zambia has laws that support participatory land use planning process but there are no guidelines on how it should be done. Thus, the research aims at assessing if the Luapula Province Planning Authority (LPPA) has a land use planning process that incorporates effective stakeholders’ participation.The research is based on secondary data, especially the land use planning process in the Urban and Regional Planning (URP) Act No. 3 of 2015 of the Laws of Zambia and the participatory land use planning process of Kilimanjaro Region.The data analysed show that there is lack of effective stakeholders’ participation in the LPPA land use planning process; the LPPA land use planning process does not have the provision to capacity build stakeholders during the land use planning process; lack of participatory land use planning guidelines; the institutional framework under customary authority is not part of the land use planning process and the LPPA land use planning process is a top-down approach.The conclusions state that the legal and institutional frameworks in existence are inadequate for effective stakeholders’ participation in land use planning process of LPPA. In addition, the stakeholders are not incorporated in the LPPA land use planning process in terms of decision making but incorporated as reactants to the decisions made by the public authorities.The recommendations are that a National Land Use Planning Commission composed of representatives from stakeholder groups needs to be established. In addition, some sections of the URP Act No. 3 of 2015 of the Laws of Zambia need amendment inorder to have continuous feedback between the land use plan makers (planning firm(s) and planning authority) and the stakeholders. Furthermore, Village Councils must be given power to make decision by establishing them as Village Planning Authorities.     

Comparing the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban expansion in Guangzhou and Shenzhen from 1975 to 2015: A case study of pioneer cities in China’s rapid urbanization

The distinct urbanization process of China has attracted worldwide attention because of its impressive speed, massive scale, and policy intervention. However, the interrelationship between urban expansion and government policies is still not well understood. The Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration of China is the first national pioneering urbanization area since the implementation of the policy “Reform and Opening-up” in the late 1970s. Here we compared the spatial and temporal patterns of urbanization in two leading cities of the Pearl River Delta (i.e., Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the provincial capital and the first Special Economic Zone of China, respectively) from 1975 to 2015, using Landsat data integrated with urban growth and landscape metrics analysis, and examined possible footprints of major economic and urbanization policies. Our results illustrated that urban land areas in both Guangzhou and Shenzhen have experienced magnificent annual growth rates at 8.1% and 11%, respectively between 1975 and 2015. On average, Shenzhen witnessed substantially higher urban growth rate than Guangzhou during the past four decades, particularly in the initial period (1978–1990) when the Reform and Opening-up policy was launched and Shenzhen was designated as the first Special Economic Zone in China in the late 1970s. However, the speed of urban expansion in Shenzhen became considerably lower than Guangzhou from 2005 to 2015, subject to physical conditions and a series of urban land use policies. Both cities showed a generally similar dynamics of urban growth forms with leapfrogging as the predominant type of urban growth at first and then edge-expansion while the contribution of infilling in Shenzhen was higher than that in Guangzhou, especially since 2005. The urbanization processes characterized by landscape and urban growth metrics revealed that a diffusion-coalescence-diffusion-coalescence process was identified for Guangzhou, while Shenzhen was generally consistent with the diffusion-coalescence urban growth hypothesis.     

Is It Worth Getting Labeled? The Case of MSC-Certified Seafood

Research has examined consumers’ attitudes toward ecolabels, but there is a lack of research examining whether niche ecolabels give a competitive advantage in consumer markets. The authors aim to fill this gap by exploring the four conditions of market success (evidence of price premiums, market share, access to retailers, and elasticities) established in the literature. Three varieties of MSC-certified fish are studied. Differences are observed across the three varieties that lead to the following conclusions: MSC-labeled products do not systematically sell at a premium; price has an inelastic effect on the demand of certified national brands, but increased distribution has a very elastic effect on demand; and MSC-labeled products do not experience seasonal effects. The consumer market is responding favorably to the label, but ecolabeled fish is in an introductory stage. Price premiums vary; the retailer’s brand is playing a prominent role.     

Do urban centers support regional goals? An assessment of regional planning in Denver

Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in the United States have instituted regional strategies to encourage development around mixed use, higher density urban centers in response to air quality and transportation challenges. Because MPOs lack regulatory authority, these organizations have relied on voluntary approaches to coordinate regional planning for land use and transportation. While scholars have examined voluntary regional planning, there have been few studies of the urban centers concept. In Denver, Colorado, the MPO’s Metro Vision plan promotes local adoption of centers supported through incentives. In this study, we examine whether existing conditions and future plans for centers support regional goals. Our approach relies on interviews and spatial data to categorize centers and evaluates whether each type of center is likely to achieve regional goals for transit, design, density, diversity, and destination. This work generated a typology of five center types: historic town centers, greenfield, industrial, commercial, and suburban mixed use. We find that the adopted centers fall short of meeting regional goals under existing conditions, but future plans for center types show promise. This typology offers more refined strategies and targeted incentives for other metropolitan regions considering a centers policy to support regional goals. There is also a need for better regional monitoring and improved indicators to assess progress.     

Hedonic pricing and the spatial structure of housing data – an application to Berlin

Housing prices are largely determined by physical location. By applying the outsample prediction accuracy of rental prices as evaluation criteria, we examine whether the choice of the hedonic model additionally depends on the spatial structure of housing data, i.e. accounting for locational effects by either district fixed effects or spatial econometric modelling. Our results show that a generalised spatio-temporal model outperforms a district fixed effects model only if the spatial density – the weighted mean distance to nearest neighbours – is relatively small. Moreover, we use the required density thresholds to deduce a pseudo indifference curve, thereby showing that the ratio of the weighted spatial distance-to-the mean district diameter increases with the mean sample size per district. This emphasises the role of data structure and district choices for model selection. Differences in data can thereby serve as an explanation for contradictory findings in literature, whether spatial econometric methods or simple district fixed effects are used.