Urban Land Use Planning in Europe: A Comparative Perspective

Dear Colleagues,

Europe is characterised by a wide range of legal, institutional, and administrative traditions which, over time, have given rise to diverse land use planning frameworks, policies, and practices. These transnational—and in some cases, even national or sub-national—differences pose significant challenges to understanding urban land use planning and ultimately limit the potential for mutual learning and policy transfer among countries, regions, and cities. These challenges, however, are hardly new. Since the end of the 1980s, scholars started to explore the heterogeneous landscape of European urban planning from a comparative perspective, until the EU Compendium of Spatial Planning Systems and Policies produced a typology that addressed the issue more systematically (1999). Since then, the research outputs developed in the framework of ESPON (ESPON projects 2.3.2, TANGO and COMPASS), ARL-International and various other institutions focused on cross-national territorial analysis, have demonstrated how urban planning in Europe continues to change and evolve, hence requiring a continuous and systematic effort to foster cross-national dialogue and understanding.

Despite their value, such compendiums and national reviews are rarely accompanied by empirical case studies that delve into detail and illustrate how different (or similar) planning frameworks influence the implementation of similar (or divergent) policies.

In this context, the goal of this Special Issue is to provide deeper insights into the varied frameworks and practices of urban land use planning across Europe by examining them through a comparative lens, supported by empirical research and detailed case studies. We specifically invite contributions that explore different dimensions of urban land use planning, provided they adopt either a transnational comparative approach or a national perspective involving comparisons across multiple regions or urban areas. Contributions may focus on either broad or niche areas within the field of urban land use planning.

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

• Policy implementation;
• Plan preparation;
• Public participation;
• Land allocation mechanisms and zoning approaches;
• Land development and development control procedures;
• Market forces and private actors in land development;
• Monitoring and evaluation of planning outcomes;
• Urban densification, sprawl, and land consumption;
• No-net-land-take policies and practices;
• Infrastructure planning and planning standards;
• Integration of climate change adaptation/mitigation in land use policies;
• Land use governance;
• GIS in urban land use planning.

Although the primary focus is on the European context, we also welcome submissions that extend beyond Europe, as long as the relevance of their findings to European planning debates is clearly articulated. Given the goals of this Special Issue and the international readership of Land, we particularly encourage authors to provide detailed and comparable descriptions of the institutional, governance, policy, and spatial contexts in which their empirical research and case studies are situated.

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

Dr. Ioannis A. Pissourios
Dr. Georgia Gemenetzi
Dr. Giancarlo Cotella
Guest Editors

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• urban planning
• land use planning
• European planning systems
• spatial policy
• urban governance
• contextual analysis
• comparative study
• cross-case analysis