Spatial-Temporal Evolution Analysis of Land Use

Dear Colleagues,

(1) Introduction, including scientific background and highlighting the importance of this research area.

Modern globalisation and the associated economic and technological developments are profoundly changing the world we live in. The changes are both positive and negative and have numerous consequences in the areas of the environment, digitalisation, demographic change, and economic and other migration. Increasingly, we are even confronted with crisis events that require enormous social efforts to regulate and manage. All of this is also closely linked to land use planning, which is subject to institutional governance in order to ensure harmonious economic and social development, a healthy living environment, and the protection of natural resources.

In view of the rapidly changing circumstances, the term land use also takes on a different meaning. In addition to traditional urbanisation processes, we are now dealing with de-urbanisation, de-agrarianization, and, at the same time, the development of new forms of settlement that are replacing traditional urban or rural structures with mixed forms of new settlement patterns.

The existing concept of land use, which primarily has a land administration status, takes on an additional regulatory significance under the new conditions. In the field of spatial planning and design, in addition to the need to ensure the planned regulation of interests in space, we are also confronted with the need to understand, stimulate, or destimulate trends and processes in space, i.e., responsiveness and quick adaption, legal–administrative relevance, and other status attributes of individual plots of land. Therefore, hybrid sciences (e. g. geosciences, urban studies, etc.) are increasingly involved in planning and design processes and provide planners and decision makers with a variety of necessary information about current social and spatial realities.

(2) Aim of the Special Issue and how the subject relates to the journal scope.

This Special Issue aims to provide an in-depth insight into the current interests and needs of the various actors in space and to understand the processes and temporal components of land use development.

(3) Suggested themes and article types for submissions.

In doing so, we aim to address the following, and other, issues related to future land use planning:

1. Which land use changes have been the most pronounced in recent decades, and by which global processes are they influenced?
2. What indicators can be used to describe and understand the processes influencing land use development?
3. How can we ensure that land use planning is manageable and measurable?
4. What new tools and methods are available to assess and analyse land use development?
5. Can we use hybrid sciences to monitor land use development in real time?
6. What are the changes in land use in urban and rural areas, and is there a cause–effect relationship between these changes?
7. How can we propose new solutions for land use planning that are based on analysing land use changes and also relying on the principles of circular economy, land reuse, and nature-based solutions?
8. How can policy debates on sustainable land use be conducted at international, national, regional, and local levels?
9. How are countries currently dealing with this issue in a conventional way, and what do they need to change in light of new realities?
10. What can we learn from the past, considering that land use is a relatively new concept, and what challenges existed when it was first coined?

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

Dr. Alma Zavodnik Lamovšek
Dr. Gregor Čok
Dr. Mojca Foški
Dr. Lea Petrović Krajnik
Dr. Dorota Jopek
Dr. Samo Drobne
Guest Editors

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• which global processes are influenced land use changes in recent decades
• land use planning in order to ensure harmonious economic and social development, a healthy living environment and the protection of natural resources
• new methodological approaches and new indicators to describe and understand the processes influencing land use development
• new solutions and models of land use planning in the circumstances of rapidly global changes
• evidence-based analysis for supporting decisions
• hybrid sciences to monitor land use development in real time
• policy debates on sustainable land use be conducted at international, national, regional and local levels