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Spatial Governance, Environmental Change, and Urban Sustainability: Planning Pathways Toward...
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Spatial Governance, Environmental Change, and Urban Sustainability: Planning Pathways Toward SDG 11 and SDG 13

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Land Planning and Landscape Architecture".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 April 2027 | Viewed by 1598

Editors

Dr. Gabriel Hoh Teck Ling

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Faculty of Built Environment and Surveying, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru 81300, Malaysia
Interests: social–ecological systems; collective action; urban planning; housing; institutional design; cities and climate change
Dr. Mou Leong Tan

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
GeoInformatic Unit, Geography Section, School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, George Town, Malaysia
Interests: remote sensing; geospatial modelling; urban land-use dynamics; environmental and climate change analysis; spatial analytics for sustainability assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Fan Tu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Urban and Rural Planning, School of Design and Architecture, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China
Interests: land management and governance; urban renewal; industrial development and land policy

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Cities today are experiencing unprecedented environmental and climatic transformations. Rapid urban expansion, land-use conversion, ecological degradation, and climate-related risks are reshaping urban regions worldwide. At the same time, global policy frameworks—particularly SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and SDG 13 (Climate Action)—call for integrated responses that link spatial development, environmental stewardship, and resilience-building. Urban planning plays a pivotal role in mediating the relationship between land systems, ecological processes, and socio-economic development. However, planning responses often remain fragmented: institutional reforms are discussed separately from spatial environmental dynamics; governance debates are disconnected from empirical geospatial evidence. Recent advances in remote sensing, spatial analytics, and land-change modelling provide powerful tools to understand urban environmental transitions. Meanwhile, institutional and social–ecological frameworks help explain how governance structures, property rights regimes, and collective action shape sustainability outcomes.

This Special Issue examines how urban planning systems address environmental change and climate pressures in pursuit of sustainable cities (SDG 11) and climate action (SDG 13). It integrates spatial governance, institutional design, land-use systems, and geospatial technologies to analyse climate-responsive urban development. By linking institutional planning research with spatial–environmental analysis, it advances understanding of how cities manage land, mitigate risk, strengthen resilience, and drive sustainability transitions across diverse urban contexts.

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

  1. Urban Land-Use Change and Environmental Dynamics: Spatial and remote sensing analysis of urban expansion, ecological change, and land degradation, urban heat island assessment, climate exposure mapping, and spatial risk modelling, land-use transition modelling under environmental and climate scenarios;
  2. Planning Institutions and Spatial Governance: Institutional adaptation to environmental and climate pressures, planning law, zoning, and development control for sustainability, multi-level and cross-scalar governance for SDG localization, property rights, land markets, and regulatory reform in sustainability transitions;
  3. Social–Ecological and Collective Action Perspectives: Governance of commons and collective resource management, community-based adaptation and participatory resilience, application of social–ecological system (SES) frameworks to urban land governance, institutional–environment feedback in land management;
  4. Climate-Responsive and Sustainability-Oriented Urban Planning: Integrating mitigation and adaptation into land-use planning, compact urban form, land efficiency, and low-carbon pathways, nature-based solutions and spatial resilience design, urban–rural land transitions under climate change;
  5. Digital and Geospatial Innovations in Urban Planning: GIS-based decision-support for sustainable land governance, spatial big data and advanced analytics for SDG implementation, remote sensing for land-use policy evaluation, artificial intelligence, simulation modelling, and digital twins for sustainability planning.

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

Dr. Gabriel Hoh Teck Ling
Dr. Mou Leong Tan
Prof. Dr. Fan Tu
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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-anonymized 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.

Keywords

  • urban planning
  • SDG 11
  • SDG 13
  • spatial governance
  • land-use change
  • remote sensing
  • social–ecological systems
  • climate resilience
  • urban sustainability
  • geospatial analysis

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

22 pages, 2315 KB  
Article
Who Has the Right to the Sidewalk? A Mixed-Methods Framework for Assessing Equitable Access to Public Space in Ben Guerir, Morocco
by Oussama Kharbach, Jérôme Chenal, Ayoub Lahlouh, Rida Azmi, Mohamed Adou Sidi Almouctar, Seyid Abdellahi Ebnou Abdem and Mariem Bounabi
Land 2026, 15(8), 1328; https://doi.org/10.3390/land15081328 - 24 Jul 2026
Viewed by 416
Abstract
Rapid urbanisation across the Global South has intensified contestation over sidewalk space, where formal planning collides with informal livelihoods. Street vending, central to the urban economy, is routinely framed as disorder and met with exclusionary interventions that overlook its socio-spatial logic. This paper [...] Read more.
Rapid urbanisation across the Global South has intensified contestation over sidewalk space, where formal planning collides with informal livelihoods. Street vending, central to the urban economy, is routinely framed as disorder and met with exclusionary interventions that overlook its socio-spatial logic. This paper asks who holds the right to the sidewalk in intermediary cities, and how planning can move from displacement toward negotiated coexistence. Using Ben Guerir, Morocco, as a case, the study integrates Space Syntax (global integration Rn, ArcGIS Pro), 60 h of behavioural mapping across 18 sessions recording 158 vendors in three daily time-bands, and a stratified perception survey (n = 120: 60 pedestrians, 30 vendors, 30 shopkeepers). Vending concentrates in the most integrated segments of the urban grid, follows pedestrian rhythms across the day, and persists despite the formal Souk Al Karama market, which remains underutilised due to its spatial isolation. The contribution is threefold: (i) extending Space Syntax and Right to the City scholarship to an under-studied intermediary-city context; (ii) showing empirically that informal vending is a spatially rational adaptation to urban accessibility, not encroachment; and (iii) translating findings into operational principles for inclusive sidewalk governance, advancing Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 11. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Spatial Governance, Environmental Change, and Urban Sustainability: Planning Pathways Toward SDG 11 and SDG 13)
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27 pages, 9156 KB  
Article
Are Urban Futures Converging? How Smart, Sustainable, Livable, and X-Minute City Paradigms Intersect in Urban Research
by Hafsa Al Balushi, Chaham Alalouch, Aliya Al-Hashim and Gabriel Hoh Teck Ling
Land 2026, 15(7), 1262; https://doi.org/10.3390/land15071262 - 13 Jul 2026
Viewed by 570
Abstract
This study investigates the conceptual and practical interlinkages among four major urban paradigms—smart cities, sustainable cities, livable cities, and X-minute cities—using bibliometric co-occurrence and citation analyses. A total of 1439 peer-reviewed publications indexed in Scopus (1979–2024) were examined to map the thematic overlaps [...] Read more.
This study investigates the conceptual and practical interlinkages among four major urban paradigms—smart cities, sustainable cities, livable cities, and X-minute cities—using bibliometric co-occurrence and citation analyses. A total of 1439 peer-reviewed publications indexed in Scopus (1979–2024) were examined to map the thematic overlaps and emerging clusters among these city concepts. The findings reveal that smart cities constitute the most interconnected paradigm, appearing in 980 publications and functioning as a technological bridge to sustainability, livability, and proximity-based planning. The smart–sustainable city nexus, evidenced by 530 shared publications, dominates the literature. By contrast, livable cities and X-minute cities represent emerging, human-centered niches with significant growth potential. The findings offer a conceptual framework for integrated urban planning and policy, demonstrating how these paradigms collectively address the complexities of contemporary urbanization. Rather than adopting singular models, urban leaders are encouraged to formulate hybrid planning agendas that reflect local needs while aligning with global urban sustainability objectives. This study calls for a comprehensive understanding of urban development paradigms. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Spatial Governance, Environmental Change, and Urban Sustainability: Planning Pathways Toward SDG 11 and SDG 13)
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