Beyond Growth: Urban Land Governance and Spatial Planning in Transition

Dear Colleagues,

Urban land systems are governed by planning instruments that assume continuous growth in population, incomes, and material consumption. Empirical evidence increasingly shows the consequences: land consumption consistently outpaces demographic change, spatial inequalities are influenced by land-use decisions, and urban regions increasingly lock in social inequalities and carbon-intensive pathways. At the same time, planning approaches that question the primacy of growth-dependent planning and call for land policies centered on sufficiency, redistribution, and equitable access, and ecological regeneration are emerging. The intellectual challenge today is to build analytical tools, metrics, and governance models that can guide land-use transitions in practice.

This Special Issue aims to move the “beyond growth” conversation from normative vision to operational knowledge. We invite original research and review articles that develop and test the instruments needed to guide urban land systems toward just and resilient futures without relying on growth as the central organizing principle. The issue is closely linked to broader terminology in land-use change, urban planning and development, and sustainability assessment. We are looking for contributions that connect at least two of the following: land governance and institutional design, spatial analysis and computational modeling, and urban morphology and resilience. The goal is to assemble a collection of studies that, taken together, show how a post-growth lens can reshape land-system science and planning practice.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

• Critical reassessments of land governance paradigms: regulatory instruments, property regimes, land-value capture, and tenure innovations for post-growth urban contexts;
• Geospatial metrics and indicator frameworks for measuring spatial justice, accessibility, and the equitable distribution of amenities and services across diverse population groups;
• Computational models (agent-based, cellular automata, machine learning, hybrid approaches) that simulate urban land-use dynamics, shrinkage, or alternative development scenarios at multiple scales;
• Urban morphology, adaptive planning, and the integration of new development within inherited built fabrics, with attention to resilience;
• Land-use policies for ecological regeneration, urban agriculture, green infrastructure, and nature-based solutions, analyzed through the lens of land-system outcomes;
• Institutional and participatory mechanisms for democratising land-use decisions, including data-driven and collaborative planning processes;
• Cross-scale analyses linking regional land governance, urban–rural interactions, and national spatial strategies under conditions of low or zero growth.

We encourage submissions that are explicit about their methodological contribution and that provide rigorous empirical or simulation-based evidence. We look forward to receiving your work.

Dr. Najmeh Mozaffaree Pour
Prof. Dr. Ali Cheshmehzangi
Dr. Zaheer Allam
Dr. Selim Bayraktar
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.

• post-growth planning
• land governance
• spatial justice
• land-use modelling
• urban resilience
• geospatial metrics