Spatial Planning and Land-Use Management—2nd Edition: Expanding the Agenda of Integrated and Multiscalar Spatial Governance

Abstract

This Editorial introduces the Special Issue “Spatial Planning and Land-Use Management: 2nd Edition” and discusses the eight articles published in it. Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that contemporary spatial planning and land-use management can no longer be understood as narrowly regulatory or sector-specific activities. Rather, they must be approached as integrative and adaptive practices capable of mediating between ecological integrity, territorial cohesion, infrastructure provision, social justice, public health, and participatory governance. The Special Issue brings together case studies from China, the United States, Australia, Iran, Portugal, Slovakia, and Belgium, as well as comparative evidence from peri-urban landscapes, and spans a wide range of spatial scales, from neighbourhoods and urban forests to metropolitan green belts, urban agglomerations, peri-urban territories, and ecoregions. Several major lines of inquiry emerge across the volume. First, the articles reaffirm the need for multiscale planning frameworks able to connect local action with regional and supra-regional structures. Second, they broaden the understanding of infrastructure by including not only transport and urban facilities, but also ecological, green, and even nocturnal infrastructures. Third, they show that many of today’s most difficult planning questions arise in spaces of transition and overlap, especially peri-urban areas, where conflicts among land uses, ecosystem services, development pressures, and governance arrangements become particularly acute across sectors and across spatial and temporal scales. Fourth, they underline that planning effectiveness increasingly depends on participation, co-design, and cooperation among diverse actors, including civic initiatives and local communities. Overall, the Special Issue highlights spatial planning as a strategic field of action through which societies can address land-use conflicts, reconcile environmental and social objectives, and design more sustainable, resilient, and liveable territories.

1. Introduction

Spatial planning and land-use management are increasingly central to contemporary territorial policy and research. This is not simply because land remains a finite resource under growing pressure, but because land-use decisions crystallise some of the most decisive contradictions of our time: economic growth versus ecological conservation, accessibility versus fragmentation, housing demand versus agricultural protection, infrastructural expansion versus territorial cohesion, and short-term political pressures versus long-term public interest [1,2,3,4,5]. In this context, spatial planning cannot be reduced to the technical allocation of functions across space. It is, rather, a strategic and normative field in which societies negotiate competing values, distribute opportunities and burdens, and define the material conditions of future development [6,7].

The first Special Issue on “Spatial Planning and Land-Use Management” highlighted the relevance of planning instruments for addressing land-use change and improving land-use optimisation, particularly using spatial analysis and modelling approaches. That first volume also revealed an important gap between increasingly sophisticated analytical tools and the still limited integration of participation and stakeholder engagement in planning practice [8]. The present second edition both continues and broadens that agenda. While land-use change remains a central concern, the contributions published here move decisively beyond a predominantly modelling-oriented perspective and deepen the debate around ecological integration, governance, spatial justice, accessibility, public health, participation, and the institutional conditions under which planning succeeds or fails.

A particularly important contribution of this second edition lies in its capacity to show that the contemporary planning field is being reconfigured along at least four major axes. The first is the growing temporal and scalar complexity of planning, which must now respond to heightened uncertainty over time while simultaneously operating across multiple levels and sectors. Planning problems are no longer legible within a single scale of intervention. Biodiversity conservation requires thinking across ecoregions and ecological corridors. Mobility systems restructure metropolitan and supra-metropolitan space. Liveability and accessibility are experienced at the neighbourhood scale. And peri-urban conflicts arise in transitional spaces where multiple spatial logics overlap.

The second is thematic expansion. Infrastructure, for example, no longer refers only to transport or utilities, but also to green infrastructure, nature-based solutions, ecological networks, and even dark infrastructure.

The third is governance pluralisation. Formal state-led planning now coexists with bottom-up initiatives, civic stewardship, collaborative arrangements, and hybrid forms of co-design and co-governance. The fourth is normative reorientation, increasingly shaped by the need for adaptation and greater regulatory flexibility. The effectiveness of planning is judged not only by efficiency or growth outcomes, but also by its ability to advance sustainability, resilience, equity, inclusion, and territorial justice.

The eight papers included in this Special Issue reflect these shifts with unusual clarity. They cover highly diverse geographical and institutional contexts, but they converge in treating space not as a passive background to social and environmental processes, but as an active medium through which conflicts are organised, resources distributed, ecological systems connected or disrupted, and collective futures imagined and governed. In that sense, the Special Issue is not merely a collection of case studies. It offers a composite picture of how spatial planning and land-use management are being rethought in response to a world marked by accelerating environmental change, intensified socio-spatial inequalities, and growing demands for more adaptive forms of territorial governance.

2. From Continuity to Expansion: The Contribution of the Second Edition

One of the most significant features of this second edition is the way it extends the intellectual horizon of the first. If the first volume was strongly organised around land-use/land-cover change, its drivers, and the analytical tools required to understand and anticipate territorial transformations [8], the present volume introduces a more explicit relational and political reading of planning. The question is no longer only how land changes, or how such change may be modelled, but also how planning institutions interpret those changes, how societies prioritise among competing uses, how infrastructures reorganise territorial relations, and how ecological and social concerns can be integrated into planning frameworks that remain operational under conditions of uncertainty and conflict.

This expansion is visible in the diversity of topics addressed. Mobility and regional interconnectivity are examined not merely as technical matters, but as structuring forces in the production of urban agglomeration space (Contribution 1). Conservation planning is approached not simply as a matter of protected-area designation, but as a multiscalar exercise requiring alignment between biodiversity targets, wildfire risk reduction, and climate change adaptation (Contribution 2). Ecological planning is further broadened by the proposal to integrate the nocturnal dimension of landscapes through dark infrastructure, thereby challenging the implicit diurnal bias that still characterises much planning thought and practice (Contribution 3). Peri-urban landscapes are analysed as arenas of ecosystem service trade-offs and governance failure, revealing that these territories are not residual or secondary spaces, but frontline territories where many of today’s key planning contradictions become visible (Contributions 4 and 5). At the urban scale, questions of accessibility, health, and quality of life are addressed through sports facilities and urban green spaces, demonstrating that liveability is inseparable from spatial justice and everyday access to urban resources (Contributions 6 and 7). Finally, participatory planning is pushed beyond consultation towards co-design, co-governance, and civic stewardship, showing that the planning capacity of a territory increasingly depends on the ability to activate distributed knowledge and collective action (Contribution 8).

Taken together, these contributions suggest that the field of spatial planning and land-use management is entering a phase in which synthesis becomes more important than sectoral depth alone. This is not because specialisation has become irrelevant, but because the problems planning must address are themselves deeply interconnected. Land-use management now requires simultaneous attention to ecological continuity, settlement patterns, mobility systems, institutional design, and everyday practices of inhabitation. The most important lesson of this volume is therefore not that planning must do more, but that it must connect more: scales with scales, sectors with sectors, expertise with participation, and immediate intervention with long-term territorial vision.

3. A Thematic Reading of the Special Issue

3.1. Mobility, Flows, and the Spatial Structuring of Urban Agglomerations

A first major theme concerns the relationship between mobility infrastructures and territorial organisation. Luan, Xiang, and Jia (Contribution 1) examine the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei urban agglomeration through the perspective of rail transit interconnectivity and show how transport systems are not merely functional supports for movement, but constitutive elements in the spatial structuring of regional urban systems. By combining the notions of urban quality and line quality, and by mobilising a framework that integrates AHP-CRITIC-TOPSIS, a modified gravity model, and social network analysis, the article demonstrates that interconnectivity increased substantially between 2010 and 2021, while also remaining unevenly distributed in a pattern characterised by strong core cities and numerous weak links.

The relevance of this contribution to the Special Issue lies in at least three aspects. First, it reinforces the understanding that transport planning and spatial planning cannot be treated separately. Rail interconnectivity does not simply respond to existing urban hierarchies. It also reproduces, reinforces, or potentially rebalances them. Second, it illustrates the analytical value of moving from static territorial representations toward a relational understanding of space organised through flows, exchanges, and networks. Third, it raises a critical planning question: greater interconnectivity does not automatically produce polycentricity. As the authors show, interconnectivity may enhance integration and stability without necessarily reducing asymmetries among core and non-core cities (Contribution 1).

This finding is especially relevant in the broader context of sustainable territorial development. Contemporary planning discourse frequently presents transport integration as inherently beneficial. Yet the article reminds us that infrastructure-led integration can coexist with spatial polarisation. From a planning perspective, the challenge is therefore not only to expand networks, but to shape them in ways that support a more balanced territorial structure. This implies differentiated policies, stronger support for non-core nodes, and closer articulation between investment in transport systems and broader strategies of urban and regional development. In this regard, the paper makes a valuable contribution to debates on how metropolitan and supra-metropolitan planning can move beyond monocentric concentration towards more integrated and polycentric forms of territorial organisation.

3.2. Ecological Planning Across Scales: Ecoregions, Corridors, and Nocturnal Continuity

A second thematic cluster concerns the deepening ecological content of spatial planning. DellaSala et al. (Contribution 2) and Wynants and Schmitz (Contribution 3) address very different territories and scales, yet both show that ecological planning requires more than static conservation categories. It demands the capacity to identify functional relationships, critical gaps, and hidden pressures within broader territorial systems.

DellaSala et al. (Contribution 2) present a multi-scaled ecoregional conservation assessment for the Southern Rocky Mountains and the Santa Fe Subregion. Their analysis reveals significant imbalances in the representation of vegetation types, mature and old-growth forests, riparian areas, and habitats for focal species in relation to conservation targets such as 30 × 30 and 50 × 50. Particularly important is the paper’s effort to connect conservation planning with wildfire risk reduction and climate change. Rather than treating conservation and hazard management as competing agendas, the study shows that they can and should be articulated if interventions are spatially targeted and ecologically informed. The finding that most thinning treatments occurred far from the wildland–urban interface is especially telling, since it questions the territorial logic of certain risk-reduction strategies and opens space for a more selective and coherent planning response (Contribution 2).

From the perspective of spatial planning and land-use management, this article is valuable because it demonstrates the importance of planning beyond administrative boundaries. The ecoregional scale enables a form of territorial reasoning that is often difficult to achieve within conventional planning systems structured by jurisdictional fragmentation. At the same time, the nested analysis of the Santa Fe Subregion shows that broad-scale conservation targets must be translated into context-sensitive subregional strategies. In other words, the paper reinforces a key planning principle: strategic coherence across scales must be combined with territorial specificity.

Wynants and Schmitz (Contribution 3), in turn, propose a methodological framework for integrating dark infrastructure into the ecological network of an urban forest near Liège. A particularly valuable aspect of this article is that it draws attention to an issue that is still often overlooked in ecological planning: ecological continuity is not only spatial, but also temporal. Much of the existing work on ecological networks has focused on land cover, habitat patches, corridors, and other daytime landscape structures, while giving less attention to how ecological conditions change at night. By examining artificial light at night as a source of fragmentation, the article expands the discussion on ecological planning and shows that nocturnal conditions also need to be considered in the design of ecological networks.

The relevance of this contribution is both conceptual and practical. On the one hand, it argues that ecological continuity should not be understood only through the physical arrangement of land uses, but also through rhythms, cycles, and environmental conditions that vary over time. On the other hand, the study suggests that broad interventions across the whole site may not always be necessary. In some cases, more focused actions in critical corridor areas may be enough to improve ecological connectivity. In this sense, dark infrastructure is not merely an additional planning layer, but a useful way of recognising darkness itself as an important condition for biodiversity conservation (Contribution 3).

Read together, these two papers signal a broader transformation in ecological planning. Conservation is no longer restricted to the designation of protected areas, nor is ecological infrastructure reducible to green and blue systems alone. Instead, planning increasingly requires the identification of functional ecological relations across scales and through time, including those affected by climate, wildfire regimes, and nocturnal disturbance. This is one of the most innovative dimensions of the Special Issue.

3.3. Peri-Urban Territories: Areas of Conflict, Trade-Off, and Institutional Failure

A third core theme concerns peri-urban landscapes. Few territories better capture the tensions of contemporary territorial development than peri-urban territories, where urban expansion, agricultural uses, ecological functions, recreational demands, and fragmented governance structures collide. Two articles in the Special Issue provide particularly strong insights into this condition.

Spyra et al. (Contribution 4) examine ecosystem service trade-offs in peri-urban landscapes through a comparative analysis of 24 case studies. Their findings show that the most common trade-offs occur between cultural and provisioning services, and between regulating and provisioning services, with urban development identified as the main driver behind these tensions. Particularly relevant is the paper’s emphasis on governance obstacles: the lack of adequate policies and planning documents, limited practical tools for dealing with trade-offs, and insufficient cooperation among actors. The article makes clear that peri-urban ecosystem service trade-offs are not merely analytical phenomena. They are governance problems that emerge when planning systems fail to mediate among competing claims over land and resources.

These findings have relevant implications for peri-urban planning. Planning in these areas cannot be limited to the designation of land uses or to a narrow approach centred only on growth control. Instead, it needs to be able to identify competing ecosystem service demands, address the tensions between them, and, where possible, support more balanced outcomes. The article also shows that these trade-offs are not usually solved through technical analysis alone. They depend on cooperation between actors, greater awareness of the issues at stake, and stronger institutional coordination, all of which remain difficult to achieve in many planning contexts (Contribution 4).

Buxton and Mercer (Contribution 5) provide a complementary perspective through their discussion of Melbourne’s green belt, with a clearer focus on the political and institutional dimensions of planning. Their analysis shows that planning failure should not be understood only as a consequence of limited data or weak methods. In this case, it is closely related to political decisions, regulatory relaxation, and the gradual weakening of long-term strategic goals. By examining the loosening of planning controls, successive changes to strategic frameworks, green belt encroachment, and the fragmentation of peri-urban land, the authors demonstrate how deregulated planning approaches can progressively weaken agricultural functions, biodiversity values, and landscape protection.

One of the main contributions of this article to the Special Issue is the idea that land-use planning remains a key force in the evolution of peri-urban areas. Rather than merely reacting to broader economic dynamics, planning actively influences these trajectories. It actively conditions land prices, subdivision patterns, permitted uses, and future options. In that sense, the Melbourne case is exemplary far beyond Australia. It reveals how difficult it is to preserve multifunctional peri-urban territories when planning is subordinated to short-term growth agendas and when cross-sectoral integration is weak or absent (Contribution 5).

These two peri-urban papers together make a major contribution to the volume. They show that peri-urban areas are not transitional leftovers awaiting urbanisation, but strategic territories where core planning questions become sharply visible: how to preserve ecological and agricultural functions under development pressure, how to address trade-offs among competing services and uses, and how to design governance systems capable of protecting long-term territorial value. They also underline that effective land-use management depends as much on institutional consistency and regulatory capacity as on analytical sophistication.

3.4. Liveability, Accessibility, and Spatial Justice in Urban Everyday Life

A fourth theme emerging from the Special Issue relates to the social and everyday dimensions of planning. Spatial planning is often approached through broad territorial strategies and major structural interventions, but its relevance is also measured in more immediate and ordinary ways. It matters in how people experience the city on a daily basis, including their access to green spaces, the distribution of essential facilities, and the extent to which urban environments contribute to health, leisure, and overall well-being.

Asgari Gandomani et al. (Contribution 6) explore these questions through the case of sports facility allocation in Tehran. Using GIS and spatial multi-criteria decision analysis, the authors show that the existing distribution of sports facilities is uneven and spatially concentrated, while the most suitable areas for future provision are located mainly in the central and southern parts of the city. The significance of the article lies in the fact that it goes beyond a purely technical reading of location-allocation. Instead, it presents the issue as one of spatial justice. Access to sports facilities has implications for health, social interaction, and quality of life, and uneven provision tends to reproduce wider socio-spatial inequalities.

From a planning standpoint, the paper is especially valuable for showing how spatial analysis can support more equitable territorial decisions. The emphasis on underserved areas and on the relationship between compatibility criteria, accessibility, and social need illustrates how urban planning can be mobilised to redistribute opportunities more fairly within highly unequal metropolitan contexts (Contribution 6). The article thus expands the thematic field of land-use management by bringing public health and social justice into direct relation with facility planning.

Cunha, Marques da Costa, and Morgado (Contribution 7), in turn, explore the role of urban green spaces in a Lisbon neighbourhood during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their mixed-methods approach, combining spatial analysis, field observation, and survey data, shows that proximity and quality jointly shape the use of urban green spaces and their contribution to liveability and health. Proximity matters, particularly for older people and children, but quality also matters because well-maintained, safe, and multifunctional spaces attract users even when they are somewhat farther away.

This article makes several important contributions. First, it provides neighbourhood-scale evidence that liveability is materially grounded in spatial accessibility and in the quality of public environments. Second, it reinforces the idea that urban green spaces should be understood as essential public health infrastructure rather than optional urban amenities. Third, it shows that planning for liveability must consider not only quantity or distance metrics, but also maintenance, safety, diversity of uses, and the perspectives of users themselves (Contribution 7).

When considered together, the Tehran and Lisbon studies give greater depth to the social dimension of this Special Issue. Both show that planning for sustainability also involves questions of fairness and the ways people use and experience urban space in everyday life. Accessibility, in this context, should be understood not only as a matter of transport, but also as an issue of how urban opportunities are distributed. In a similar way, liveability is not just a general planning objective, but something shaped by daily interactions between people and places. These contributions show that spatial planning is most valuable when it helps improve the everyday spaces of urban life.

3.5. Participation, Co-Design, and Civic Capacity in Contemporary Planning

A final theme running through the Special Issue concerns participation and the evolving role of civic actors in planning. In their study of Slovakia, Slobodníková and Tóth (Contribution 8) examine civic initiatives linked to green infrastructure and nature-based solutions and show that these actors often do more than simply support formal planning processes. In many cases, they step in where institutional action has been slow, bring in specific forms of knowledge, help create or recover green spaces, give new uses to neglected land, and strengthen environmental awareness and local stewardship. An important point made by the article is that civic action should not be understood only as a substitute for institutional shortcomings. It can also play an active part in reshaping governance practices and in encouraging more participatory approaches to planning.

This is a highly relevant contribution to the broader debate on spatial planning and land-use management. It suggests that the effectiveness of planning increasingly depends on distributed capacities that exist beyond formal administrative structures. In other words, planning is not only what planning authorities do. It is also what emerges when communities, associations, experts, and local actors co-produce territorial transformation. The article therefore challenges narrow understandings of participation as consultation and instead foregrounds longer-term processes of co-design, co-governance, and stewardship (Contribution 8).

Importantly, this participatory dimension resonates well beyond the Slovak cases. The governance challenges identified in peri-urban ecosystem service trade-offs (Contribution 4), the need for stronger cross-sectoral planning in Melbourne (Contribution 5), and the user-oriented lessons emerging from Lisbon (Contribution 7) all point in the same direction: planning systems work better when they can incorporate multiple knowledges, foster cooperation across actors, and remain open to adaptive and place-sensitive forms of intervention. Participation, however, is not presented here as a normative slogan. The Special Issue makes clear that participation requires enabling frameworks, institutional receptivity, and long-term support. Without these, civic energy risks remaining fragmented, under-recognised, or unable to scale.

For this reason, the Slovak paper occupies an important place in the Special Issue’s overall architecture. It provides concrete evidence that inclusive planning is not merely about adding stakeholders to predefined processes, but about rethinking how authority, expertise, and responsibility are distributed in the making and care of space. In this sense, it offers one of the clearest bridges between environmental planning and democratic innovation.

4. Cross-Cutting Contributions to Spatial Planning and Land-Use Management

Beyond the contribution of each individual article, this Special Issue also points to a number of broader issues that are relevant to the field of spatial planning and land-use management.

First, the papers clearly show that planning is inherently multiscalar. The cases discussed in this volume range from neighbourhoods and urban green spaces to peri-urban territories, green belts, urban agglomerations, forests, and ecoregions. This diversity is meaningful because it shows that planning problems do not emerge at a single scale. They are shaped by interactions between local, regional, and wider territorial processes. For that reason, effective land-use management requires the ability to connect these different levels of analysis and intervention. Scale, therefore, is not just a technical way of framing a problem, but part of the problem itself.

Second, the Special Issue broadens the understanding of infrastructure. Across the different articles, infrastructure includes not only rail transport systems and urban facilities, but also green infrastructure, nature-based solutions, ecological networks, urban green spaces, and dark infrastructure. This wider perspective is important because it shows that infrastructure is not limited to supporting movement or economic activity. It also shapes access, influences how places are experienced, contributes to biodiversity, and affects the long-term organisation of territories. A broader understanding of infrastructure is therefore increasingly important in contemporary planning.

Third, the volume shows that conflict and trade-offs are central to land-use management. Questions related to peri-urban ecosystem services, green belt protection, biodiversity conservation, wildfire management, transport development, or the allocation of urban facilities all involve competing interests and uneven impacts. In this sense, planning cannot be seen simply as a neutral tool for organising space. It is also a political and institutional process through which tensions are recognised, discussed, and managed. Its effectiveness depends largely on how these tensions are addressed and on whether adequate frameworks exist to negotiate between competing demands.

Fourth, the volume places significant emphasis on the institutional conditions of planning. Several contributions show that good intentions, strategic visions, or advanced methods are insufficient where governance is fragmented, deregulated, weakly coordinated, or disconnected from civic initiative. Conversely, stronger integration, cooperation, and participatory capacity can significantly improve planning outcomes. This suggests that one of the central tasks for future spatial planning research is to connect territorial analysis more directly with questions of institutional design and governance performance.

Finally, the Special Issue reinforces the normative relevance of spatial planning. The articles do not treat planning as a purely descriptive or procedural field. They engage, explicitly or implicitly, with major public values: sustainability, resilience, liveability, inclusion, biodiversity protection, and spatial justice. This is important. At a time when planning systems are frequently pressured by short-term demands and sectoral fragmentation, the volume reminds us that planning remains one of the few public arenas in which long-term collective interests can still be articulated spatially.

5. Conclusions

“Spatial Planning and Land-Use Management: 2nd Edition” brings together a diverse but remarkably coherent set of contributions. Across different geographical contexts, methodological approaches, and thematic concerns, the eight papers converge in showing that spatial planning and land-use management are indispensable for addressing the intertwined social, environmental, and territorial challenges of the present. They also show that these challenges can no longer be addressed through narrow sectoral perspectives or through planning systems that operate at a single scale and in institutional isolation.

This volume points to several broader conclusions about contemporary spatial planning and land-use management. One of the clearest is that planning needs to work in a more integrated way, particularly through improved coordination across vertical and horizontal scales. Many of the issues discussed in this Special Issue lie at the intersection of ecological conservation, infrastructure, public health, governance, and social justice, rather than within a single sector. The articles also show that planning problems unfold across different spatial levels, from neighbourhoods to ecoregions, which means that responses need to connect local, regional, and wider territorial perspectives. At the same time, the volume suggests that planning must remain open and adaptable. Although conventional land-use categories are still important, they are no longer enough on their own to capture territories shaped by flows, changing environmental conditions, shifting actor relationships, and overlapping spatial dynamics. Another important point is that planning needs to be genuinely participatory, not only in a formal sense, but also in its ability to include civic initiatives, user perspectives, and shared forms of territorial care in the shaping of spatial change.

The Special Issue further suggests that the future of land-use management will depend not only on stronger analytical methods, but also on stronger institutional capacity. Effective planning requires clear and coherent regulatory frameworks, better coordination across sectors, strategies that respond to the specificities of place, and meaningful engagement with stakeholders and communities. Without these conditions, even technically advanced planning approaches may struggle to protect ecological systems, address inequalities, or contribute to more liveable and resilient territories.

In this regard, the contributions assembled here do more than document contemporary challenges. They provide conceptual and empirical guidance for rethinking planning as a strategic practice of territorial mediation. Whether the issue is rail interconnectivity in a large urban agglomeration, ecosystem service trade-offs in peri-urban landscapes, the erosion of a metropolitan green belt, the equitable allocation of urban facilities, the everyday value of green spaces, civic-led nature-based solutions, or the protection of nocturnal ecological continuity, the central lesson is the same: spatial planning matters because land matters, and land matters because it is where ecological processes, infrastructures, institutions, and social life meet.

This second edition therefore confirms the continued relevance of spatial planning and land-use management as core instruments for promoting sustainability, territorial cohesion, ecological integrity, and human well-being. It also reinforces the need for continued interdisciplinary dialogue among researchers, planners, policymakers, and practitioners. Such dialogue is essential if planning is to remain capable of guiding territorial change toward more equitable, resilient, and environmentally responsible futures.