Participatory Land Planning: Theory, Methods, and Case Studies

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, participation in land and urban planning processes has received growing interest in both academia and public administration. Following the era of the “designed plan”, on expert knowledge and legitimized by disciplinary knowledge, planning approaches have emerged that pay greater attention to participation in territorial decision making and question the more conventional hierarchical nature. Different methods and instruments have been designed and implemented to channel participation in planning (action planning event, community planning forum, prioritising, etc.), although there is still some way to go. In this sense, there is debate about the role of participation in planning, its advantages and disadvantages, who should participate, the relationship between the actors, what methods to implement, etc. There are still questions to be resolved, including the following: How should this be done? What is the appropriate spatial scale for participation? How can professionals best take advantage of local knowledge and resources? How can we change the way we understand space? Who should decide?

We hope that this Special Issue will contribute to improving the understanding of participation in territorial and urban planning and facilitate international exchange. Thus, we are interested in contributions that link participation with territorial and urban planning, whether through theoretical, methodological work or empirical research through case studies.

The goal of this Special Issue is to present papers (original research articles and review papers) that provide insights into participation in land and urban planning.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

• Theory of land and urban planning;
• Land and urban policy;
• Collaborative planning;
• Strategic planning;
• Territorial governance;
• Actor networks.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Oswaldo Ledesma González
Dr. Rafael Merinero Rodríguez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• collaborative planning
• governance
• land management
• network management
• participation
• strategic planning
• town planning
• urban agenda
• urban and land planning
• urban and land policy