Search Results (57)

This study analyzes land use dynamics in Fălticeni Municipality over four decades (1985–2025), examining the influence of major political, socio-economic, and demographic changes on urban development. The transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, Romania’s democratic transformation and European integration, together with migration and population dynamics, have driven largely unregulated urban expansion at the expense of agricultural land and natural landscapes. Recent urban growth has also extended into areas with varying geomorphological vulnerability, increasing exposure to landslide hazards, while the city continues to face challenges related to abandoned industrial areas and insufficient forested land and green spaces. By integrating land use change analysis with physical vulnerability indicators, this study highlights the need for risk-informed and sustainable urban planning in medium-sized cities. It proposes a planning framework based on ecological zoning, controlled urban expansion on suitable terrain, brownfield redevelopment, the establishment of peri-urban forests, and the implementation of essential infrastructure supported by comprehensive geomorphological susceptibility assessments. The proposed approach provides practical guidance for enhancing urban resilience and can be replicated in other cities facing similar environmental and development challenges. Full article

Upper Silesia, historically shaped by hard-coal mining and coal-based energy production, is undergoing a critical phase of just transition under the European Union’s 2050 climate-neutrality objective. This study examines the legal, institutional, and spatial conditions shaping this process and assesses declared social acceptance in seven mining subregions of the Silesian Voivodeship comprising 64 municipalities. The research combines structured desk research on European Union, national, and regional policy and legal instruments with a CATI survey of electricity consumers in the transformation area (N = 602). Particular attention is given to regulatory barriers affecting the revitalization and redevelopment of post-mining and post-industrial land. The document analysis reveals fragmented institutional responsibilities, weak coordination between sectoral strategies, and insufficient integration of mine-closure, revitalization, and spatial-planning regulations. The survey findings indicate that public support for the energy transition is conditional rather than unconditional. Respondents generally acknowledge the need for change; however, they expect the principal financial burden to be borne by the state budget and energy companies, while direct household financing receives only marginal support. The results also show that the survey measured self-reported familiarity with the term “energy transition” rather than objectively tested knowledge. The study contributes an integrated analytical framework linking governance, legal-regulatory constraints, post-mining land regeneration, and declared social acceptance in a coal region undergoing structural transformation. Full article

Resilient and sustainable industrial site reclamation is a critical challenge in post-disaster recovery, particularly in contexts marked by institutional uncertainty, limited resources, and competing stakeholder priorities. Decisions on industrial relocation and redevelopment are essential for achieving balanced urban growth and efficient land use but are often constrained by conflicting socio-economic, environmental, and governance objectives. This study develops a scalable decision-support framework based on the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to evaluate alternative industrial site reclamation strategies under uncertainty. The framework integrates economic, environmental, social and land use criteria within a hierarchical decision structure and employs triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) together with Buckley’s geometric mean aggregation to derive priority weights from expert judgements. The framework is demonstrated using the Al-Qaboun industrial area in post-disaster Damascus. Results indicate that relocation to Adra Industrial City represents the preferred reclamation strategy. A sensitivity analysis demonstrates the stability of the prioritisation under alternative weighting scenarios, confirming the robustness of the proposed framework. The framework is transferable because its hierarchical structure can be adapted to different industrial sites by modifying evaluation criteria and stakeholder inputs while retaining the same FAHP methodology. The study provides a transparent decision-support approach for resilient industrial redevelopment and contributes to Sustainable Development Goal 11. Full article

In the context of urban regeneration and the redevelopment of existing urban land and built assets, industrial heritage has become a cross-sectoral policy issue involving heritage conservation, spatial reuse, land governance and public cultural uses. Existing studies have primarily examined individual adaptive reuse projects and spatial strategies, whereas the long-term evolution of policy texts has received less systematic attention. Taking Shanghai as a case study, this paper constructs a clause-level corpus of industrial heritage-related policies issued between 2006 and 2025. The corpus comprises 524 clauses extracted from 86 policy documents covering heritage conservation, historic building conservation, cultural and creative industries, land use, planning, urban renewal and industrial tourism. Overall and stage-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) models are combined with cross-period topic alignment to identify the structure and evolution of policy themes. The results show that Shanghai’s industrial heritage policies have been shaped not only by heritage conservation concerns, but also by industrial land governance, the transformation of underused industrial land, the regeneration of existing industrial spaces (EIS), industrial culture, tourism and public service provision. Four stages are identified: initial exploration, regulatory consolidation, revitalisation and renewal, and integrated consolidation. Across these stages, four major evolutionary pathways can be observed: industrial land supply and governance, renewal of EIS and old industrial areas (OIA), industrial heritage conservation and value recognition and the expansion of industrial culture, tourism and public services. The paper provides clause-level evidence for understanding industrial heritage governance in China’s urban regeneration context and highlights the need for stronger coordination between heritage, land, planning, industry, culture and tourism policies. Full article

Urban regeneration projects offer critical insights into contemporary urban land-use planning, particularly through high-profile interventions that reflect distinct planning visions and strategic approaches. This study examines two major regeneration initiatives in Athens: the redevelopment of Faliro Bay along the southern waterfront and the regeneration of Akademia Platonos in the northwest. Faliro Bay, designated as a metropolitan hub in the revised Athens Master Plan, is currently the focus of a regeneration project aiming to transform a predominantly state-owned area—including former Olympic facilities and a degraded waterfront—into a major cultural and recreational destination, combining extensive green public spaces with landmark developments through public–private collaboration. In contrast, the Akademia Platonos project is a public-led intervention within a dense urban setting, encompassing an archaeological site, former industrial premises, and mixed-use neighborhoods. Its objective is to reorganize land uses, reduce building intensity, and enhance open space and public amenities. These cases are comparatively assessed in terms of strategic orientation, governance structure, planning practices, and outcomes; this analysis highlights divergent planning trajectories and underscores the institutional, spatial, and governance challenges shaping the implementation of urban regeneration policies in contemporary Athens. Full article

Urban regeneration is critical for addressing contemporary urban challenges, yet its complexity arises from the dynamic interactions among different participants’ preference and strategic behavior factors, making it a multi-agent system driven by strategic behaviors. This study, based on a Chinese urban regeneration case, develops a dynamic evolutionary game model for industrial park renewal to explore the strategic interactions among three key stakeholders: government, social capital, and property owners. The findings reveal three insights: Firstly, the probabilities of social capital participation and property owner cooperation exhibit opposing trends, highlighting conflicting incentives. Secondly, social capital participation follows an inverted U-shaped trajectory with investment ratios, reflecting a strategic trade-off between risk and control; further robustness checks incorporating time delays and phased investments confirm that the curvature of this trajectory is highly sensitive to the project’s development cycle. Thirdly, lower land repayment costs, higher rental income, greater project returns, and a higher profit-sharing ratio promote cooperative strategies among property owners, though this effect remains marginal. The study further demonstrates that non-cooperative behavior among property owners results in a single evolutionary stable strategy (1, 1, 0) where the government repurchases land property rights, and social capital acquires these rights for redevelopment. The findings suggest that this conclusion applies specifically to industrial park renewal in urban centers held by property owners in cities, where it is government-led facilitation, with property owners exiting and social capital entering simultaneously, thereby ensuring alignment of multi-agent strategic behavior in China. Full article

As China’s urbanization transitions from incremental expansion to stock-based renewal, industrial land redevelopment has become a key pathway for promoting high-quality urban development. However, existing studies mostly assess redevelopment potential from a single dimension and lack a systematic framework integrating ecological function (E), spatial structure (S), economic conditions (C), and building foundations (B). Taking the built-up area of Xi’an as a case study, this study adopts a functional–structural optimization perspective and constructs a four-dimensional ESCB assessment framework based on 13 indicators covering ecological function, spatial structure, economic conditions, and building foundations. GIS-based spatial quantification, MiniBatchKMeans clustering, and the XGBoost algorithm were employed to identify the redevelopment potential of industrial land, while SHAP analysis was used to interpret indicator contributions and determine the core influencing factors. The results show that industrial land in the study area can be classified into four types: vitality–density dominant, transport–scale coordinated, scale–facility lagging, and topography–vegetation sensitive, with significant differences in spatial distribution and indicator characteristics. The interpretable machine learning model further identifies road network density, block-level economic vitality, and land-use suitability as the three principal drivers of redevelopment potential, among which road network density plays the most critical role. By integrating clustering analysis with interpretable machine learning, the ESCB framework effectively reveals the synergies and trade-offs among multidimensional indicators and provides differentiated and precise support for industrial land redevelopment strategies. Full article

This study examines the ripple effects of parkification, the transformation of post-industrial landscapes into public parks and green infrastructure, in Greenville at the Upper State region of South Carolina. As many Southern mill towns contend with industrial decline, environmental degradation, and complex land-use legacies, parkification has emerged as a pragmatic response to constraint rather than a conventional redevelopment strategy. Framed as a process rather than an isolated design outcome, parkification is understood here as a generative mechanism that produces cumulative spatial, ecological, and institutional change beyond individual project boundaries. Using a mixed-methods approach that integrates spatial and temporal mapping, archival research, site analysis, and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and decision-makers, this study traces how parkification unfolds across time and scale. Three interconnected case studies in Greenville, Falls Park on the Reedy, Conestee Nature Preserve, and the Swamp Rabbit Trail, are examined to address how post-industrial parkification contributes to greenway network formation and broader urban–regional transformation in the American South. The findings reveal that parkification consistently emerged from conditions of environmental constraint, including contamination, flooding, infrastructural legacies, and limited redevelopment feasibility. Early parkification projects functioned as generative landscape nodes that catalyzed the expansion of green space and connectivity rather than remaining isolated amenities. By establishing visible, accessible, and publicly valued landscapes, these projects enabled the extension of trails, river corridors, and preserved infrastructures, contributing to the formation of an interconnected regional greenway system. Institutional alignment among civic organizations, public agencies, and landscape professionals further supported the scaling and replication of parkification. Together, these findings position parkification as a process-based landscape strategy capable of driving the spread of green areas and long-term urban connectivity in post-industrial regions. Full article

Soil monitoring is increasingly important for environmental sustainability and biodiversity protection, as urbanization and industrial development expose fertile land to pollution risks. Soil quality can be assessed through physical–chemical parameters and by analyzing land use evolution, highlighting the need for integrated procedures that jointly address land use transitions and soil health. This study assesses temporal soil changes (2004–2019) in an area affected by impactful industrial activities (Tito Scalo, Southern Italy), alongside major land use transformations. We explore the potential of a procedure based on a combination of standard techniques: analysis of land use/cover changes, magnetic susceptibility measurements from two field surveys (2004 and 2019) as a proxy for heavy metal concentrations, and ²²⁶Ra soil concentration measurements, proving to be a decisive factor in better interpreting the evolution of magnetic susceptibility values. Results show that, despite increased industrial activities and expanded sealed areas, magnetic susceptibility values decrease in the second survey. This suggests that policy measures, including temporary suspension of certain industrial activities and remediation efforts, positively influenced environmental quality. The proposed procedure is low-cost, time-efficient, and independent of local geological, bioclimatic, or socio-economic conditions, making it suitable for monitoring areas under high anthropogenic pressure and for evaluating the effectiveness of remediation and recovery strategies supporting mitigation or remediation actions and enabling functional redevelopment of remediated sites. Full article

As former chemical sites, especially retired pesticide plants, the redevelopment of “brownfield” land imposes urgent demands for detailed environmental investigation and remediation. Addressing the current limitations in pollution characterization, which often remain confined to two-dimensional representations and lack research on the vertical migration mechanisms of heavy metals and their integration with three-dimensional remediation and management strategies, this study focuses on a typical retired pesticide plant site in Southeastern Zhejiang, China. Through systematic analysis of 916 soil borehole samples collected from 92 sampling points, the study integrates three-dimensional visualization technology and three-dimensional ordinary kriging interpolation to establish a high-precision three-dimensional characterization system covering stratigraphy, pollution plumes, and composite risks. The findings reveal that the As and Ni pollution plumes have volumes of 5.35 × 10⁴ m³ and 2.78 × 10⁵ m³, respectively. Furthermore, As and Ni exhibit significant vertical migration capabilities within sandy and silty soil layers, while elements such as Hg, Cd, and Pb are primarily concentrated in the surface fill layer. By combining three-dimensional risk modeling based on the single-factor pollution index, Nemerow comprehensive index, and potential ecological risk index, the study precisely classifies the site into four graded zones: safe use zone, basically safe use zone, low-risk control zone, and high-risk control zone. This approach enables the visualization and quantification of pollution levels. The research constructs a comprehensive methodological framework that extends from three-dimensional pollution characterization to zonal management decision-making, providing scientific evidence and technical support for the precise remediation and sustainable redevelopment of similar retired industrial sites. Full article

In the context of urban development transforming from external expansion to internal improvement, identifying the patterns and characteristics of urban industrial land shrinkage and proposing response strategies are crucial for achieving high-quality and sustainable urban development. Unlike previous studies that focused on the expansion of industrial land based on absolute changes in land area, we propose a formation mechanism for urban industrial land shrinkage from the perspectives of both absolute and potential shrinkage. We quantitatively identified the Chinese cities that experienced shrinkage between 2006 and 2020, and developed a comprehensive indicator system to investigate the changes in the structural and functional characteristics of industrial land use during this process. The results indicated that urban industrial land shrinkage has become a widespread phenomenon nationwide. Absolute shrinkage was predominantly attributed to resource depletion and a lack of economic development, while potential shrinkage was mainly influenced by high-quality development and a lack of economic development. Cities exhibiting potential shrinkage experienced more severe structural deterioration, while cities with absolute shrinkage faced greater functional degradation. Extensive land use remains a serious challenge that must be addressed in industrial land redevelopment. Finally, we propose that more attention should be given to the utilization of stock urban industrial land, in particular in cities with relatively low administrative levels, small populations, and remote locations. Urban land redevelopment projects need to be conducted in accordance with the principle of intensive land use to promote the sustainable development of cities. Full article

Post-industrial landscapes represent one of the most complex challenges for contemporary sustainable land management, as they combine environmental degradation, cultural heritage, and socio-economic restructuring. This study examines five representative post-industrial sites within the Dąbrowa Basin (southern Poland), selected from an initial pool of 20 locations to capture the full diversity of contemporary transformation pathways. The research integrates multi-temporal satellite imagery (1999–2025), historical maps (1936, 1965), extensive field surveys, and a systematic review of literature and regional press to assess environmental, functional, and cultural dimensions of landscape change. The results reveal four distinct transformation trajectories: hydrological reclamation, heritage-led revitalization, passive ecological succession, economic redevelopment, and one additional case of unmanaged degradation. Hydrological and cultural revitalization produced the most sustainable outcomes, characterized by high environmental stability, strong public accessibility, and preserved industrial identity. Natural succession created ecologically valuable but functionally limited spaces, while commercial redevelopment ensured economic stability at the cost of industrial memory. Sites lacking coordinated revitalization remain unsafe, inaccessible, and environmentally unstable. The study demonstrates that post-industrial transformation is strongly influenced by municipal engagement, land ownership, historical legacy, and the interaction between natural and engineered processes. These findings contribute to the international discourse on sustainable post-industrial redevelopment and highlight the need for integrated, cross-sectoral strategies supporting multifunctional, resilient landscapes in Central Europe. Full article

The construction industry is a major contributor to global resource consumption and waste. This sector extracts over two billion tons of raw materials each year and contributes over 30% of all solid waste generated annually through construction and demolition debris. The movement toward circularity in the built environment aims to replace linear processes of extraction and disposal by promoting policies favoring building preservation and adaptive reuse, as well as the salvage and reuse of building materials. Few North American cities have implemented explicit policies that incentivize circularity to decouple urban growth from resource consumption, and there remain substantial hurdles to adoption. Nonetheless, existing regulatory and planning tools, such as zoning codes and historic preservation policies, may already influence redevelopment in ways that could align with circularity. This article examines spatial patterns in these indirect pathways through a case study of a college town in New York State, assessing how commonly used local planning tools shape urban redevelopment trajectories. Using a three-stage spatial analysis protocol, including exploratory analysis, Geographically Weighted Regressions (GWRs), and Geographic Random Forest (GRF) modeling, the study evaluates the impact of zoning regulations and historic preservation designations on patterns of demolition, reinvestment, and incremental change in the building stock. National historic districts were strongly associated with more building adaptation permits indicating reinvestment in existing buildings. Mixed-use zoning was positively correlated with new construction, while special overlay districts and low-density zoning were mostly negatively correlated with concentrations of building adaptation permits. A key contribution of this paper is a replicable protocol for urban building stock analysis and insights into how land use policies can support or hinder incremental urban change in moves toward the circular city. Further, we provide recommendations for data management strategies in small cities that could help strengthen analysis-driven policies. Full article

Culture-led urban regeneration represents a potent strategy for revitalizing post-industrial cities but necessitates navigating complex property rights fragmentation and competing stakeholder interests. This research interrogates how different institutional arrangements mediate this process, balancing economic development with cultural preservation and social sustainability. Through a comparative case study of two seminal projects in Xi’an, China—the Yisu Opera Society and the Old Food Market—this paper examines the divergent outcomes of two property rights reconfiguration strategies: land assembly and rights subdivision. Findings reveal a fundamental trade-off: while the land assembly model facilitates efficient, large-scale redevelopment and economic revitalization, it often precipitates gentrification and the erosion of socio-cultural fabric. Conversely, the rights subdivision approach, though incurring higher ongoing transaction costs, fosters more equitable and embedded regeneration by preserving community networks and authentic character. Grounded in Property Rights and Transaction Cost theories, this study con-structs an analytical framework to evaluate how governance structures, stakeholder dynamics, and contextual factors shape project outcomes. The research concludes that there is no universal solution; the optimal pathway depends on the specific heritage context and social embeddedness of a site. It contributes to urban scholarship by highlighting the critical role of flexible, hybrid governance models in managing urban complexity and offers practical policy insights for designing regeneration frameworks that can more equitably distribute the benefits of urban development. Full article

As Chinese cities move toward stock-based development, the redevelopment of inefficient industrial land has become essential for urban spatial restructuring and sustainable transformation. Building on Lefebvre’s triadic theory of spatial production, this study establishes a comprehensive analytical framework consisting of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces, aiming to elucidate the mechanisms underlying spatial reconfiguration. Through a multi-case inductive approach, twelve representative cases from Zhejiang Province are systematically analyzed to reveal the fundamental logic driving spatial reconstruction within the context of inefficient land redevelopment. The results reveal the following: (1) In the process of inefficient land redevelopment, spatial practice involves land reuse and functional integration, representations of space reflect institutional planning, and representational spaces shape meaning through cultural identity and user experience. These dimensions interact dynamically to drive the transformation of both the form and meaning of inefficient land. (2) The redevelopment of inefficient land in Zhejiang can be classified into two primary models: increment-driven and qualitative transformation, which are further divided into seven subtypes. The increment-driven model includes enterprise-initiated renewal, integrated upgrading, platform empowerment, and comprehensive remediation; the qualitative transformation model comprises mine remediation, cultural empowerment, and use conversion. (3) Significant differences exist between these models: the increment-driven model emphasizes land expansion and floor area ratio improvement, while the qualitative transformation model enhances land value through mine restoration, cultural embedding, and functional transformation. This study extends the application of spatial production theory within the Chinese context and offers theoretical support and policy insights for the planning and governance of inefficient industrial land redevelopment. Full article