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Floods are a reoccurring global phenomenon. Practical implementation of flood risk management relies heavily on grey infrastructure with a lesser focus on nature-based solutions (NBS). With the rising awareness about ecosystem services, natural flood management measures are getting more attention from scientists and policymakers. Lithuanian authorities in the national flood risk management plan provide four NBS for flood management: afforestation, wetlands restorations, agri-environmental measures, and water retention in urban areas (e.g., ponds). However, implementation of the NBS requires more land than grey infrastructure. In the case of Lithuania, in some instances, the NBS require a change of the land use or impacts upon the private land. Therefore, it can be influenced by the legal regulations related to land use planning and protection of private property rights. The problems may occur in case of the insufficient, incomplete, incoherent, or contradictory legal framework. The analysis revealed that the Law on the Land, the Law on the Special Land Use Conditions, and the Law on the Territorial Planning are insufficiently coordinated, which may influence implementation of the NBS on the private property. The afforestation is foreseen only for the public land. However, those lands are mainly used for the agriculture, and in this case possibilities to change the land use are restricted. A similar problem may occur if the area for the afforestation lays within the protected area. The Law on the Protected Areas allows land use changes only in exceptional circumstances; the flood mitigation is not one of them. The incoherence or incompleteness of law, which can hamper implementation of NBS, can occur not only in Lithuania. Therefore, the study can be a starting point for further investigations and solutions in this regard.

As cities increase in size and density, the ecosystem services supplied by urban greenery and green infrastructure are increasingly vital for sustainable, liveable urban areas. However, retaining and maximising urban greenery in densifying cities is challenging. Governments have critical roles in addressing these challenges through policy development and implementation. While there has been significant attention on the quality and quantity of green space on public land, there is an increasing focus on policy mechanisms for integrating green infrastructure into the private realm, including green roofs, walls, facades, balconies and gardens. As part of City of Melbourne’s efforts to increase greening across the municipality, its 2017 Green Our City Strategic Action Plan includes specific focus on the private realm, and development of regulatory processes for green infrastructure. This article reports on a participatory research project to develop a Green Factor Tool for application to building development proposals in Melbourne. We focus on the transdisciplinary collaborations that brought together contributions from researchers, practitioners, policymakers and designers. We discuss how local research on green space contributions to provision of ecosystem services shaped the design of the tool and provided the tool’s rigorous evidence-base. Finally, we consider the roles of urban planning in retaining and maximising urban green spaces in densifying urban areas.

We present gridded 8 km-resolution data products of the estimated stem density, basal area, and biomass of tree taxa at Euro-American settlement of the midwestern United States during the middle to late 19th century for the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. The data come from settlement-era Public Land Survey (PLS) data (ca. 0.8-km resolution) of trees recorded by land surveyors. The surveyor notes have been transcribed, cleaned, and processed to estimate stem density, basal area, and biomass at individual points. The point-level data are aggregated within 8 km grid cells and smoothed using a generalized additive statistical model that accounts for zero-inflated continuous data and provides approximate Bayesian uncertainty estimates. The statistical modeling smooths out sharp spatial features (likely arising from statistical noise) within areas smaller than about 200 km2. Based on this modeling, presettlement Midwestern landscapes supported multiple dominant species, vegetation types, forest types, and ecological formations. The prairies, oak savannas, and forests each had distinctive structures and spatial distributions across the domain. Forest structure varied from savanna (averaging 27 Mg/ha biomass) to northern hardwood (104 Mg/ha) and mesic southern forests (211 Mg/ha). The presettlement forests were neither unbroken and massively-statured nor dominated by young forests constantly structured by broad-scale disturbances such as fire, drought, insect outbreaks, or hurricanes. Most forests were structurally between modern second growth and old growth. We expect the data product to be useful as a baseline for investigating how forest ecosystems have changed in response to the last several centuries of climate change and intensive Euro-American land use and as a calibration dataset for paleoecological proxy-based reconstructions of forest composition and structure for earlier time periods. The data products (including raw and smoothed estimates at the 8-km scale) are available at the LTER Network Data Portal as version 1.0.

This study aimed to understand whether, and to what extent, Kenyan legal provisions are sufficient to secure community land rights, particularly those of indigenous peoples and local communities. It assesses the adequacy of Kenya’s legal framework for protecting and promoting tenure rights of forest communities, including over protected areas. There is an enduring problem pertaining to historical land injustices, where certain indigenous peoples and local communities have sought formal recognition of their land rights over areas classified as public land, which are managed mainly as public forests or national wildlife reserves. The analysis uses three indicators to evaluate the levels of protection and securing of community land and forest tenure rights: the scope and security of tenure; the legal status and protection of indigenous peoples’ (forest peoples’) tenure rights; and community participation in management of public forests. It demonstrates that there are improvements in legal protection for indigenous communities. Nonetheless, a legal conundrum results from how Kenyan courts have interpreted the law concerning claims by certain indigenous communities over land falling under article 63(2)(d)(i) of the Constitution, mainly classified as public land or forests. For example, whereas the African court recognized the Ogiek rights over Mau Forest, the Kenyan courts have declined to do so. Also, despite its finding, the African Court did not prescribe how those land rights can be actualized; and the courts in Kenya have advised the communities to utilize the resolution of historical land injustices procedures prescribed in law. This Occasional Paper explores this case and others.

Günümüzde, özellikle sağlık, eğitim, turizm yatırımlarının gerçekleştirilmesi; büyük çaplı alt yapı projelerinin uygulamaya konulmasının özel hukuk kişileri tarafından yapılması, bir özel hukuk kurumu olan üst hakkına kamu malı olan taşınmazlar üzerinde de başvurulmasına sebep olmuştur. Kamuya ait taşınmazlar üzerinde kurulan üst hakkının taşıdığı işlevsel önem sebebiyle bu durum kamu hukukuna ilişkin kaynaklarda da yer almıştır. Bu nedenle, makalemizde kamu hukuku kaynaklarında üst hakkını da kapsayan irtifak hakları ile ilgili getirilen düzenlemeler ve bunların Medeni Kanun’da ki üst hakkı hükümleriyle olan ilişkisi ele alınacaktır. The fact that the investments particularly in health, education and tourism are made and the large-scale infrastructure projects are implemented by private legal persons has led to the fact that the right of construction, which is a private law institution, is also resorted for the public properties. Due to the functional significance of the right of construction, which is established on public properties, this situation is also included in the sources on the public law. Therefore, our article will address the regulations imposed on rights of easement that also involves the right of construction in the resources on public law as well as their relationship with the provisions of right of construction in the Civil Code.

International audience; In recent years, the sale of public land has become a fairly widespread financing solution: capital gains obtained from the sale and redevelopment of public land, and secured through the planning system, are employed to fund new public infrastructure or facilities. While this is often presented as an optimum solution for hard-up public authorities, this paper draws on the sociology of policy instruments to shed light on the unspoken political choices and uneven distributional effects of landbased financing. These choices concern the aims of public land use (where financial uses are prioritized over redistributive/productive uses), the roles played by public authorities (whose role as speculative landowner is prioritized over that of land use regulator), and the coordination of both land sales and redevelopment (where market coordination is prioritized over political coordination). Based on a casestudy of the Ministry of Defence Estates London (MoDEL) project, this paper shows how these choices have been institutionalized into binding financial calculations and contractual agreements that actually limit the use of public land, overlook alternatives, drive up land values and exacerbate exclusionary effects.

La liberalisation de l’economie observee ces quarante dernieres annees en Grande-Bretagne semblait etre une affaire connue. Pourtant, la plus grande privatisation de l’histoire du Royaume-Uni a echappe au grand public comme aux specialistes des politiques economiques. La vente des terrains publics – definis comme des terrains possedes par des autorites publiques locales ou nationales – a represente le plus grand transfert de biens jamais observe vers le secteur prive. Depuis 1979, date a laqu...

This essay shows how a specific understanding of landscape (fūkei) as an agricultural landscape associated with the collective imagination, memory, and the activities related to vegetable farming enabled artist Taho Ritsuko to engage survivors of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, which struck Osaka-Kōbe in 1995, in a movement of reconstruction and renewal (fukkō). The project involved the survivors in the entire process, from conception to realization, of a work intended for a communal outdoor space in the danchi (a new public housing complex) where they were being relocated. The project gained renown in Japan for the political and administrative battle won, which gave the survivors the right to independently cultivate part of the public land in the Minami-Ashiyahama district. By involving them in a creative process that became political, the artist aimed to encourage their interaction and create an active co-presence consistent with the notion of ba (scene, place, or field). Composed of two landscape sculptures, the work was integral to the process of forming and establishing a community.

Resumo No Brasil, o Estado sempre criou condições favoráveis para garantir a participação do setor privado nas transformações do espaço urbano, em especial em obras de infraestrutura de transporte e logística. Neste texto, buscamos discutir as disputas pela terra pública e, também, pelo modelo de gestão portuária, no contexto da expansão econômica nas primeiras décadas do século XXI. Ao delimitarmos o porto de Santos como nosso recorte territorial de análise, buscamos precisar os elementos, atores, agentes e conflitos de interesses presentes nessa disputa, bem como a forma pela qual eles se articulam em diferentes escalas. A abordagem transescalar aqui adotada como estratégica metodológica ancorou-se em relações de contínuas aproximações entre fundamentação teórica e imersão empírica. Nesse debate, a função social da terra pública, com oscilações ao seu papel ambiental e econômico, ganha centralidade.

International audience; Urbanization leads to land-use changes and landscape fragmentation, impacting natural habitats and their connectivity. In principle, many local decision-makers are obliged to adopt a mitigation hierarchy whereby development projects must be designed to avoid impacts on biodiversity, reduce, and ultimately compensate for the remaining impacts to reach the goal of no net loss (NNL) of biodiversity. In practice, however, both developers and regulators lack relevant practical tools to support their strategies to better anticipate and plan this mitigation hierarchy. More importantly, the available tools generally ignore connectivity issues and ecological constraints. Here, we propose an original methodology that anticipates future urban needs under different development scenarios and selects the most relevant strategies for biodiversity offsets (BO). We used a spatialized digital simulator (called SimUrba) to model fine-scale urban dynamics, combining it with ecological networks modelling based on graph theory to assess the environmental impacts of urbanization on a habitat connectivity index for focal species. We test the different outcomes produced by adopting two offset ratios (1:1 and 2:1) using this approach. The methodology is applied to empirical data on the future urban sprawl of a large French city up to 2040 under two realistic development scenarios currently discussed by policy-makers, and on 20 species that we grouped by type of habitat. Our results reveal that that the most highly impacted species are those associated with open and semi-open areas, and cultivated plots. Then, we identify the most promising cells for BO implementation to compensate for negative effects on habitat area, according to gains in habitat connectivity. We further show that using both private and public land can maximize habitat connectivity by including larger plots and reducing the number of plots needing long-term monitoring. Finally, we demonstrate that using standard offset ratios that ignore connectivity issues is very risky and can compromise any BO objective. Overall, we show that this framework provides decision-makers with a valuable and precise strategic tool that articulates land-use planning with ecological constraints to identify whether, how and where NNL objectives can be achieved.

Outdoor and nature-based recreation provides countless social benefits, yet public land managers often lack information on the spatial and temporal extent of recreation activities. Social media is a promising source of data to fill information gaps because the amount of recreational use is positively correlated with social media activity. However, despite the implication that these correlations could be employed to accurately estimate visitation, there are no known transferable models parameterized for use with multiple social media data sources. This study tackles these issues by examining the relative value of multiple sources of social media in models that estimate visitation at unmonitored sites and times across multiple destinations. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 social media posts and 286,000 observed visits from two regions in the United States, we compare multiple competing statistical models for estimating visitation. We find social media data substantially improve visitor estimates at unmonitored sites, even when a model is parameterized with data from another region. Visitation estimates are further improved when models are parameterized with on-site counts. These findings indicate that while social media do not fully substitute for on-site data, they are a powerful component of recreation research and visitor management.

Six studies published between 1978 and 2017 used data from the Census Bureau’s annual publication, Government Finances, to identify trends in local park and recreation expenditures. This paper evaluates the validity of the Government Finances data and conclusions of analyses drawn from it by comparing annual data on park and recreation expenditures collected annually by the Trust for Public Land (TPL) from 2008 through 2017 from the same agencies in the same years published in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Government Finances.Results revealed several key discrepancies between the datasets. First, the Government Finances average total, operating, and capital expenditures for the 100 cities were substantially higher than those reported by TPL. Second, the TPL data showed a gradual and incremental decrease in total expenditures over the decade, whereas the Government Finances data showed a substantial increase in total spending, especially after 2012. Third, the declines in the TPL data in total and operational spending from 2008 to 2009, which marked the onset of the Great Recession were 11.31% and 17.69%, respectively, whereas the Government Finances data showed increases of 1.05% and 5.96%, respectively. Fourth, the Government Finances data showed increases from 2008 to 2016 of 22% in total spending and 6% in operational spending, suggesting park and recreation agencies had fully recovered from the Great Recession, but the TPL data showed declines of 20% and 16% in those expenditures, respectively. Fifth, averages masked substantial variations among cities, as there were dramatic differences in expenditures in the two data sets for many individual municipalities. Our analyses confirmed that concerns relating to the Government Finances dataset were legitimate. Applying those data to monitor trends in expenditures of “mainline” park and recreation agencies is inappropriate and is likely to mislead rather than inform. For the Government Finances data to have utility, the Census Bureau should divide them into “core” and “non-core” services. If that is not done, then we recommend that state associations use the TPL definitions and questionnaire to collect primary information about park and recreation expenditures either annually or biennially to improve monitoring accuracy and inform policy and decision-making. Subscribe to JPRA

Almost USD 3 billion per year is appropriated for wildfire management on public land in the United States. Recent studies have suggested that ongoing climate change will lead to warmer and drier conditions in the western United States, with a consequent increase in the number and size of wildfires, yet large uncertainty exists in these projections. To assess the influence of future changes in climate and land cover on lightning-caused wildfires in the national forests and parks of the western United States and the consequences of these fires on air quality, we link a dynamic vegetation model that includes a process-based representation of fire (LPJ-LMfire) to a global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem). Under a scenario of moderate future climate change (RCP4.5), increasing lightning-caused wildfire enhances the burden of smoke fine particulate matter (PM), with mass concentration increases of ∼53 % by the late 21st century during the fire season in the national forests and parks of the western United States. In a high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), smoke PM concentrations double by 2100. RCP8.5 also shows enhanced lightning-caused fire activity, especially over forests in the northern states.

Right-of-way (ROW) land areas are required for all publicly owned transportation roadways representing over 40 million acres within the US alone. These relatively unused land assets could support potential farming land for plants and algae that contain high levels of lipids that could be used in the energy industry as an alternative fuel source. This process would offer many benefits including more efficient use of public land, eliminating mowing maintenance, increasing the bioenergy use in the US, providing visually appealing viewscapes, and helping to naturally reduce localized carbon dioxide. This paper analyzed the feasibility and potential optimization strategies of using this concept in the South-Eastern United States by scaling and comparing many of the benefits and risks associated with the selected lipid sources (soybeans, flax, sunflowers, Tung trees, Chinese tallow tree, and microalgae). Based on this assessment, the most attractive option appears to be growing flax in the winter and sunflowers in the summer with Tung Trees grown year-round as an alternative option. This would maximize lipids output while preserving and enhancing right-of-way land areas.

The redevelopment of Barangaroo, Sydney’s last vacant central city waterfront site, raised high expectations for the public benefits developers would provide in return. The story highlights the ways in which the entrepreneurial State’s conflict of interest in the redevelopment eroded the quality of the public benefits negotiated in return for a valuable public asset. In contrast to the previous redevelopment projects, the State used public land and its newly centralized regulatory powers to maximize public revenues from Barangaroo, prioritizing these over both the public’s interests and, on occasion, those of private developers.

The Latinx population is the largest growing minority population in the United States and is estimated to comprise 28% of the U.S. population by 2050. This continued growth is no longer due to foreign-born immigration, which accounted for 34% of all Latinx people in 2015, but rather to those born in the U.S., who comprised 66% of all Latinxs that year. Therefore, the current and future Latinx population consists of second-, third-, and fourth-generation Americans who report being fluent in English and Spanish, have higher levels of education, and earn higher incomes. As the Latinx population becomes larger and more complex, their outdoor recreation preferences and perceptions are also changing. Our survey findings reveal three significant ways that this is happening. First, Latinxs are expanding their recreation activities beyond day-use activities to engage in overnight backpacking and camping—activities that enable participants to explore a broader array of forests and natural resources. Second, despite earlier research that found significant gaps in environmental awareness among “Hispanics,” recent polling data and this study show that today’s Latinxs overwhelmingly support protecting public lands. Third, while prior research identified overt racial discrimination as a significant barrier to public land use, our findings show that the Latinx population feels welcome on federal and state public lands. Staff and other visitors are generally perceived to be friendly, which suggests a shift in a Latinx sense of belonging when visiting national forests and parks. Nonetheless, there continue to be institutional barriers and low visitation rates to public lands amongst racial and ethnic minorities. Future research on Latinx outdoor recreation on public lands could examine how new generations draw meaning from their outdoor experiences and how they are combining traditional cultural traits with more diverse and active outdoor recreation activities. Subscribe to JPRA

Managers are increasingly being asked to integrate climate change adaptation into public land management. The literature discusses a range of adaptation approaches, including managing for resistance, resilience, and transformation; but many strategies have not yet been widely tested. This study employed in-depth interviews and scenario-based focus groups in the Upper Gunnison Basin in Colorado to learn how public land managers envision future ecosystem change, and how they plan to utilize different management approaches in the context of climate adaptation. While many managers evoked the past in thinking about projected climate impacts and potential responses, most managers in this study acknowledged and even embraced (if reluctantly) that many ecosystems will experience regime shifts in the face of climate change. However, accepting that future ecosystems will be different from past ecosystems led managers in different directions regarding how to respond and the appropriate role of management intervention. Some felt management actions should assist and even guide ecosystems toward future conditions. Others were less confident in projections and argued against transformation. Finally, some suggested that resilience could provide a middle path, allowing managers to help ecosystems adapt to change without predicting future ecosystem states. Scalar challenges and institutional constraints also influenced how managers thought about adaptation. Lack of institutional capacity was believed to constrain adaptation at larger scales. Resistance, in particular, was considered impractical at almost any scale due to institutional constraints. Managers negotiated scalar challenges and institutional constraints by nesting different approaches both spatially and temporally.

Almost US$ 3bn per year is appropriated for wildfire management on public land in the United States. Recent studies have suggested that ongoing climate change will lead to warmer and drier conditions in the Western United States with a consequent increase in the number and size of wildfires, yet large uncertainty exists in these projections. To assess the influence of future changes in climate and land cover on lightning-caused wildfires in National Forests and Parks of the Western United States and the consequences of these fires on air quality, we link a dynamic vegetation model that includes a process-based representation of fire (LPJ-LMfire) to a global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem). Under a scenario of moderate future climate change (RCP4.5), increasing lightning-caused wildfire enhances the burden of smoke fine particulate matter (PM), with mass concentration increases of ~ 53 % by the late-21st century during the fire season. In a high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), smoke PM concentrations double by 2100. RCP8.5 also shows large, northward shifts in dry matter burned, leading to enhanced lightning-caused fire activity especially over forests in the northern states.

While risk is a key concern in property development, it tends to be discussed by planners only relative to the effects of regulatory planning on private sector risk. Yet planning encompasses a broad range of activities that go beyond its function of regulating private sector development. Despite active approaches to land development being commonly used across different planning contexts, frameworks for analysing public sector strategies to address risk are rarely discussed. We attempt to redress this deficit by investigating the actions of public sector development actors with regard to risk across three different land development models: public land development, land development by public-private partnership, and land readjustment. Using recent Dutch experience, we conduct an institutional analysis of each land development model in order to highlight the effects of alternative governance structures on risk as a particular transaction attribute, from the perspective of public sector planning. Our findings indicate the importance of highlighting the role of public risk in alternative models of land development where there may be a tendency to adopt institutional arrangements without due regard to this, and point to possible future applications of institutional analysis at the particular, rather than the general, level.

The theoretical aspects of application of information and communication mechanism in the field of public transport are defined. The object of study is the field of public land transport services. The purpose of the article is to analyze the world experience in implementing information and communication mechanism and substantiate the need for the use of appropriate technologies in the public administration of the sphere of services in the land public transport in the capital city. The conceptual foundations of creating smart-cities are revealed. The attention is focused on the information and communication technologies as one of the areas of smart-specialization of the city of Kyiv. The world tendencies of introduction of the information-communication or smart-technologies are presented. The problems of functioning of urban transport system are revealed. The feasibility of introducing an intelligent transport system has been proved. The key issues that need to be addressed to improve the current situation in the field of the land public transport in the city of Kyiv are outlined. There is also an emphasis on improving the performance of the carrier-company. The relationship between the information- communication, regulatory, organizational, financial mechanisms is revealed. The need to involve the city dwellers in the development of the management decisions is emphasized.

Pastoralism is widely practiced in arid lands and is the primary means of livelihood for approximately 268 million people across Africa. Environmental, interpersonal, and transactional variables such as vegetation and water availability, conflict, ethnic tensions, and private/public land delineation influence the movements of these populations. The challenges of climate change and conflict are widely felt by nomadic pastoralists in Somalia, where resources are scarce, natural disasters are increasingly common, and protracted conflict has plagued communities for decades. Bereft of real-time data, researchers and programmatic personnel often turn to post hoc analysis to understand the interaction between climate, conflict, and migration, and design programs to address the needs of nomadic pastoralists. By designing an Agent-Based Model to simulate the movement of nomadic pastoralists based on typologically-diverse, historical data of environmental, interpersonal, and transactional variables in Somaliland and Puntland between 2008 and 2018, this study explores how pastoralists respond to changing environments. Through subsequent application of spatial analysis such as choropleth maps, kernel density mapping, and standard deviational ellipses, we characterize the resultant pastoralist population distribution in response to these variables. Outcomes demonstrate a large scale spatio-temporal trend of pastoralists migrating to the southeast of the study area with high density areas in the south of Nugaal, the northwest of Sool, and along the Ethiopian border. While minimal inter-seasonal variability is seen, multiple analyses support the consolidation of pastoralists to specifically favorable regions. Exploration of the large-scale population, climate, and conflict trends allows for cogent narratives and associative hypotheses regarding the pastoralist migration during the study period. While this model produces compelling associations between pastoralist movements and terrestrial and conflict variables, it relies heavily on assumptions and incomplete data that are not necessarily representative of realities on the ground. Given the paucity of data regarding pastoralist decision-making and migration, validation remains challenging.

The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires were Australia’s worst bushfire disaster and sparked an intense political debate including a lengthy and contested Royal Commission. One policy measure discussed following the disaster was the level of prescribed burning conducted in Victoria, which dominated hyperbolic public discourse and the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. Environmental groups and some ecologists cautioned against proposals for a hectare-based target, while many foresters and lobby groups advocated for it and pointed to the success of targets in the jarrah forests of South-Western Australia. Understandings of Indigenous burning practices were drawn upon or dismissed during the debate over the need for more burning, though only as rhetorical flourishes rather than detailed considerations. Following the Royal Commission, Victoria adopted a state-wide target for 5 per cent of public land to be annually burned from 2010 to 2014, though this was recently abandoned in favour of a ‘risk-based’ strategy.

This paper deals with the environment and health hazards with respect to urban growth in the Kathmandu valley cities of Nepal. Air and water pollutions and poor sanitation are the most serious public health issues in the cities of Kathmandu valley. The urban growth in the valley is very rapid and urban expansion has taken place haphazardly encroaching upon prime agricultural land, public land, open spaces, riverbanks, and forestland. The urban environment continues to deteriorate and provision of urban utility services is quite inadequate as to the need of alarmingly rising urban population in the valley cities. The health of the people living in the valley’s urban areas is affected by the pollution of air, water, and sanitation, as well as by a huge loss of greenery and watershed coverage. However, urbanization is essential for social and economic development in Nepal and so, well-being of the people, if it is well planned and the existing urban policies and acts implemented sincerely and dedicatedly.

International audience; The abuse in public land assets with no particular effort to renew it, and the implementation of Law 25/90 have led to a dizzying rise in land values that continue to affect urban land on a sustainable level. The following situation is combined with the scarcity or even absence of varied social housing, which affected directly the conditions of access to land assets in the city of Khenifra and Morocco in general. Today, housing costs are rising faster than household income levels. This situation has resulted in the development of a group of housing cooperatives that play a dual role of collecting and encouraging savings, carrying out subdivisions and infrastructure construction meanwhile. The birth of this self-help housing type in Khenifra dates back to 1993, when a first housing cooperative called Al Arz, initiated by a group of teachers, laid the foundations for a practice that would later become a sustainable phenomenon that impeded the city's urban planning and governance.

Urban activities such as housing, productive space, green space, offices, etc., compete for scarce urban land, especially in cities with population growth, such as London and Brussels. Thereby, low-value uses such as production have a more vulnerable position in a private property market governed by real estate dynamics in comparison to high-value uses such as offices and housing. While local authorities of post-industrial cities grow more susceptible to revitalizing their relationship with productive activities, they risk losing the space to do so due to industrial gentrification. Based on the disappearance of production space in the case of the Brussels Capital Region (BCR), this article aims at evaluating how the BCR supports urban production, with a clear focus on zoning and the provision of production space. Although the BCR is a post-industrial city, it continues to lose production space at a rapid pace. Employing an analytical framework of urban settlement patterns of production, we analyse the production-related zone typologies in inner-city areas as well as in more peripheral mono-functional and mixed areas of the BCR. Our analysis of the production-related zone typologies of the BCR land-use plan demonstrates that industrial gentrification plays an important role in current deindustrialization processes. This article presents zoning strategies to regulate the private property market as well as public land strategies to preserve urban production space.

The federal government owns nearly 30 percent of all lands in the United States, and those lands generally are managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the Forest Service (FS), and the National Park Service (NPS). Each of the agencies responsible for managing federal land has a significant backlog of overdue maintenance projects. These maintenance needs are known as deferred maintenance, and together they form the maintenance backlog. The total maintenance backlog in 2019 was over $19 billion, with the largest share ($12 billion) held by the National Park Service (NPS). The deferred maintenance backlog has become a more pressing issue as use of America’s federal lands continues to increase. In 2018, national parks received more than 300 million visitors, which is roughly 33 million more than in 2009. Unless effective policy solutions are implemented, deferred maintenance costs likely will continue to grow as more visitors create more wear-and-tear on roads, trails, and other resources in the parks. Effectively addressing the maintenance backlog could enhance the visitor experience by improving infrastructure, such as roads and bathrooms, that have fallen into disrepair. It also would help ensure that federal lands are being conserved properly. In this policy paper the authors begin by examining how the maintenance backlog was created and why it has persisted over time. They then outline several solutions that potentially could be adopted to address the maintenance backlog. These solutions include giving park managers more control over entry fees, amending land acquisition policy to set aside money each year to be spent on deferred maintenance, and making use of concessionaire agreements to allow private companies to manage federal lands more effectively

The North American Nitrogen Center (NANC) carries out three main charges: (1) conducting assessments on nitrogen (N) flows within North America and the consequences for human health, water resources, biodiversity, and greenhouse gas emissions; (2) facilitating efforts to develop solutions to the problem of excess nitrogen in agricultural, institutional, and natural resource management sectors; and (3) presenting these results to policy makers. There are formidable challenges in reducing N loss from all parts of the North American food production and supply chain, including altering consumer behavior. The NANC is working with producers, trade groups, universities, and supply chains to develop effective practices for minimizing loss of reactive nitrogen (Nr) to the environment. The NANC is also helping public land management and regulatory agencies prepare effective policy approaches toward minimizing ecological damage from atmospheric Nr deposition.

This chapter explores the case study of Korean American initiatives to erect ‘comfort women’ memorials on public land in the United States, memorializing women and girls held in sexual servitude to the Japanese imperial armed forces during the 1930s and 1940s. Such efforts entail a process of contestation (as well as collaboration) among elements of two migrant groups, Korean Americans and Japanese Americans, while the host society (represented by local governments in the United States) plays arbiter in negotiating between each group’s claims to the historical narrative. It provides insights into memory politics and diaspora politics, as well as the interactions between them, in a multicultural settler nation.

This study examines the Advocates & Allies initiative, a men faculty peer-to-peer professional development program designed to disrupt gender inequities in academia. The pedagogical approach is grounded in a grassroots-based critical analysis, was developed at a public land grant university, and has been introduced at over twenty additional higher education institutions. Data from five universities and two professional association conferences are included in this study. Results of this mixed methods case analysis illustrate why academic men may be motivated to engage in gender equity work; findings also confirm that the model increases participants’ knowledge of unconscious bias and its impacts, prepares men with tools to enact change, and enhances personal commitment to gender equity, thereby affirming and extending the existing knowledgebase on effective allyship. The data suggest that the approach is an effective transformative model of intellectual activism that could be adopted by a wider sphere of academic institutions.

From 2007 through 2017, Oregon implemented an incentive program for biomass collection and production. This research evaluates renewable biomass production and deliveries during a 3-year period (2012 to 2014) in which this tax credit was in place. We evaluated total delivered tons, average payments per load, delivered location, and average transportation distance of woody biomass. We found that total delivered tons of biomass decreased each year between 2012 and 2014, as did the number of users participating in the tax credit program. The average delivered tons, by participant, was more than double in 2014 its level in earlier years, suggesting that fewer, larger entities were participating. We also evaluated differences in biomass delivery, based on receipts, transportation distances, and tons delivered, for each land ownership class. There were statistically significant differences between private and public land ownership for 2012 and 2013 but not for 2014, which included fewer applicants. Our study showed that effective biomass utilization policies need to provide sufficient economic incentives to encourage adoption by both participants and biomass energy producers, and, to be effective, to consider the complete supply chain and type of energy produced. Future economic conditions in Oregon will most likely include rapid changes in renewable energy technologies and fluctuations in fossil fuel prices, and any truly effective renewable energy policies must be sufficiently nimble to account for these and other uncertainties.

Since the 1970s, covenants running with the land have tethered a large majority of the new housing units produced in the United States. These private restraints usually continue for generations, until a majority or super-majority of covenant beneficiaries affirmatively vote to amend or terminate them. Covenants interact with public land use controls, particularly zoning ordinances. Zoning politics tends to freeze land uses in urban America, particularly in existing neighborhoods of single-family homes. This article investigates to what extent covenants exacerbate the zoning freeze. It provides a history of the use of private covenants, and suggests how drafters, judges, and legislators might address the risk that covenants will become obsolete.

Public land plays a central role in contemporary urban planning struggles. Using a comparative case study approach focused on the north-eastern US cities of Newark and New York City, we uncover pat...

Given Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMN) ubiquitous infrastructure and excellent coverage, they can be used for providing location information for various location-based services, especially in indoor environments. This paper investigates indoor positioning solutions which utilize received signal strength measurements obtained by mobile device from PLMN cells belonging to multiple mobile network operators. Two indoor positioning methods, based on Support Vector Machine learning algorithms and space-partitioning principle, are proposed. The first method utilizes Support Vector Regression (SVR) algorithm, whilst the second one introduces space-partitioning principle and the combined use of Support Vector Classification and SVR algorithms. The proposed techniques are thoroughly investigated in a real indoor environment. In addition, several criteria for choosing relevant cells for the positioning purposes have been explored. Positioning with SVR has demonstrated good results, while utilizing space-partitioning principle has further reduced the average positioning error by 27%. Moreover, the proposed solution has outperformed positioning methods based on k Nearest Neighbours and Artificial Neural Networks, when implemented in the same verification test bed.

Land ownership determines fundamental interests, prescribing a framework of alliances and oppositions around its development and use. The public sector constitutes one of the main categories of large landowners, although this type of ownership takes more than one form, due to the wide variety of public sector bodies holding property. Public land management became one of the focuses of austerity policies in many European countries after the burst of economic crisis in 2008–2009, externally imposed in those countries that went through bailout programmes. In Greece, the history of land policy shows that a fundamental objective of state policy was the distribution and liquidation of public land, a policy that contributed to the formation of an extensive system of small land ownership. From 2010 onwards, a plethora of formal legislation sought to accelerate development procedures for the remaining large-scale public property, as a background resource to attract large-scale, so-called “strategic”, investments. This paper explores the critical characteristics and outcomes of the reforms to transform public land policy, identifying the interactions with urban planning, before and during the economic crisis. Taking a longer temporal view, the paper highlights the entrenched relationships existing between public land policy, urban planning and property development processes and their significance in the diachronic continuities often concealed in major policy reversals and reforms. It argues that ultimately there is a lack of a coherent and sustainable public property valorisation policy, being deprived of any institutional innovation for new forms of urban development, as well as of social acceptance.

The Brazilian Amazon rainforest is protected largely by command and control regulation of public and private land. The Brazilian Forest Act requires private landholders within the Amazon to set aside 80% of their land as legal reserves for nature protection, but this requirement can be reduced to 50% if more than 65% of a state’s territory is protected public land (for example, public conservation units and indigenous reserves). In the ongoing land designation process in Brazil, some Amazonian states may cross this 65% threshold. We assess the potential reduction in the legal reserve requirement from 80% to 50%, through spatially explicit modelling of scenarios concerning land tenure consolidation, employing up-to-date databases on land ownership. Depending on the outcome of land designation processes and political priorities, some 6.5–15.4 million hectares of private land previously protected as legal reserves may become available for legal deforestation. While protection of public land is crucial for safeguarding the Amazon, revisions of federal and state legislation may be needed to avoid the further extension of protected public land triggering increased legal deforestation on private lands. Zero-deforestation commitments and other initiatives may mitigate impacts in the absence of such revision.

Knowledge of the relationships among psychological constructs such as values and motivations that influence proenvironmental behavior provides public land management agencies with guidance on how to minimize stakeholder impacts on the environment. A rich body of research has demonstrated that values form a tripartite structure underlying environmental concern, encompassing biospheric, egoistic, and altruistic values; however, recent work has suggested hedonic values are also an instrumental basis for environmental concern. Few studies have tested this proposition. We contend that hedonic values are instrumental in explaining the psychological processes that gird individual decisions, particularly in nature-based settings where stakeholder decisions are compelled by leisure pursuits. Our results indicate that place-based motivations, particularly escape from the pressures of everyday life, can help close the prominent value–action gap and explain why outdoor recreationists engage in minimum-impact activities specified in the U.S. Leave No Trace educational outreach program.

A growing body of research shows affluent White neighborhoods have more acres of parks and more park facilities than low-income ethnic minority communities in many Global North cities. Most of these investigations focused on neighborhood-level differences and did not analyze broader inequities across cities. This is a particularly significant limitation in the U.S., where changes in the political economy of parks due to a reduced local tax base have led cities to compete against each other to secure park funding from national nonprofits and public agencies. To address this gap, we examined whether the quality of urban park systems – measured through The Trust for Public Land’s ParkScore – varies depending on a city’s median income and ethnic composition. Based on multivariate regressions in which we control for features of the urban fabric, we found U.S. cities with higher median incomes and lower percentages of Latino and Non-Hispanic Black residents have higher ParkScores than other cities. Some inequities also emerged for park coverage, park spending per person, and park facilities, with majority-Latino cities being particularly disadvantaged. These findings echo the results of neighborhood-level studies in Global North contexts, suggesting neighborhood-level inequities in park provision might scale up to inequities across cities. This study contributes to environmental justice theory and advocacy by demonstrating the importance of scaling up analyses of park provision to cross-city comparisons. Implications for landscape planning, public policy, and grant-making are discussed.

An integrated approach to understanding ecosystem service values in Wyoming and Montana, USA is presented. The assessment encompasses a major river basin, and includes a synthesis of existing data and research related to the natural system and separate data collection efforts regarding the social and economic importance of ecosystem services. A holistic look at the social-ecological system provides nuanced information about ecosystem service values and tradeoffs for the purpose of public land decision-making. The initial ecological assessment concluded that water resources were particularly vulnerable, which guided the social and economic assessments. The social assessment applied Q-methodology, ultimately identifying and exploring four archetypes regarding views on the importance of 34 ecosystem services, which were dubbed “environmental”, “agricultural”, “Native American”, and “recreation”. The economic assessment applied choice modeling to understand non-market values of ecosystem services (i.e., agricultural community, aquatic biodiversity, river angling, and motorized winter recreation), and latent class analysis provided insight into preference heterogeneity previously indicated in the social assessment. The structured approach can inform natural resource decision-making by including several different perspectives, integrating multiple spatial scales, highlighting particular ecosystem services as relevant within the context of many ecosystem services, and facilitating relations between the public and natural resource stewards.

The Colorado Plateau is one of North America's five major deserts, encompassing 340,000 km² of the western United States, and offering many opportunities for restoration relevant to researchers and land managers in drylands around the globe. The Colorado Plateau is comprised of vast tracts of public land managed by local, state, and federal agencies that oversee a wide range of activities (e.g., mineral and energy extraction, livestock grazing, and recreation). About 75% of the Plateau is managed by federal and tribal agencies and tens of millions of people visit the Plateau's public lands each year. However, even in the face of this diverse use, our knowledge of effective ways to restore Plateau ecosystems remains relatively poor. Further, the multiple agencies on the Plateau have mandates that differ greatly in allowable practices, restoration needs, and desired outcomes. The Colorado Plateau is also expected to undergo ecosystem shifts in the face of climate change, further complicating management decisions and potentially limiting some options while creating others. Here, we explore the current state of Colorado Plateau restoration science and underscore key challenges and opportunities for improving our capacity to maintain the myriad of services provided by these desert ecosystems. We highlight past research efforts and future needs related to restoration concepts, including consideration and design of novel ecosystems, mitigation for and adaptation to climate change, use of genetically diverse seed adapted for current and future conditions, and the value of strong multi‐agency and stakeholder collaborations in restoring systems on the Colorado Plateau and beyond.

Joan Littlewood’s Stratford Fair, a late manifestation of her Fun Palace idea, aimed – through community-led and temporary playgrounds – to reclaim public land compromised by local government slum clearance in East London. Scholarship to date has discussed the Fair as a trigger for the political imagination of local youth, but not the central role that media played in the constitution of its public agenda. This article explores the archive as an active site of representation of the Fair. Recorded and circulated through monthly diaries, the Fair’s events generated affects that fostered attachment and identity, while its distributed media archive maintains a latent regenerative potential and invites plural historiography.

Small-scale race events are a popular form of recreation in natural areas with the potential for social and environmental impacts. Leave No Trace-based communication and education strategies are the most prevalent form of mitigating recreation impacts on public lands. To understand competitive race participants’ perceptions of Leave No Trace, this exploratory study compared race event participants’ attitudes, evaluative beliefs, and global perceptions of Leave No Trace by event type: gravel road running, trail running, mountain biking, and motorcycle trail racing. Data were collected using online post-event surveys. Participants were sampled from five competitive race events on public land held during fall 2015 to summer 2016. Significant differences between event types were found for all constructs examined. Motorcycle racers were the least likely to agree that Leave No Trace is an effective method for protecting the environment, least likely to believe that humans have the potential to cause social or environmental impacts, and were the least willing to change their behavior if they found out it was damaging the environment. Runners’ attitudes toward specific Leave No Trace behaviors were the least in line with Leave No Trace recommendations, while mountain bikers were the most in-line. Management implications When issuing permits and managing events on public natural areas, managers should approach each affair differently, realizing that the type of event may influence the level of social and ecological impact. Managers should contact event organizers as early as possible to raise awareness of possible impacts, provide tailor-made messaging to participants, and develop management plans specific to the event and location that monitor and adaptively manage impacts to preserve social experiences and ecological resources. This will help managers remain flexible in their event management.

Population growth and competing recreational, environmental, and economic pressures increasingly threaten urban-proximate protected areas throughout the world. In the Wasatch Mountains of Northern Utah, proposed ski resort development on and near protected areas has elicited strong resistance from environmental groups and human-powered backcountry recreationists, such as backcountry skiers, for over thirty years. Recent collaborative planning processes (i.e., Mountain Accord) have been unable to reconcile the interests of backcountry recreationists and the local ski industry. This study examined the environmental values and perceptions of one stakeholder group, backcountry skiers, toward infrastructure development in order to test a new research and management tool, the Management Options Matrix. Results indicate relationships between backcountry skiers’ environmental values and development perceptions that can help inform future collaborative planning processes in the Wasatch. These findings have implications for managers in Northern Utah, as well as public land managers working in other park and protected area contexts that experience high visitation and conflict over limited resources. Management implications ● Managers seek tools that help categorize specific constituent group’s values and perceptions, as well as interpret how they may inform management solutions. ● The paper presents five different groups of management options addressed to the specific environmental values of the target group and development themes present in the study population. ● This approach allowed the organization of protected area users’ comments into defensible categories that provide managers with population-specific information to craft durable, collaborative solutions.

Ex ante analyses of agricultural practices often examine stated preference data, yet response behavior as a potential source of bias is often disregarded. We use survey data to estimate producers’ willingness to rent public land for rotational grazing in Wisconsin and combine it with information on nonrespondents to control for nonresponse and avidity effects. Previous experience with managed grazing and rental decisions influenced who responded as well as their rental intentions. These effects do not produce discernable bias but still encourage attention to this possibility in other ex ante contexts. Land rental determinants and willingness-to-pay estimates are also related to grazing initiatives.

We investigate the public preference heterogeneity of planting genetically improved poplar trees for biofuel production on public land in western Canada. Using a sample of the public from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, respondents were asked to vote in a series of hypothetical referenda comparing the new, proposed forest policies with the current policy (base scenario). Proposed policies varied based on poplar breeding method (traditional, genomics, or genetic modification) and whether poplars may be used for biofuel production. A respondents’ segmentation framework with cluster analysis and probit model was applied to data of respondents to uncover the heterogeneity of public’s perception. The results of this study reveal that positive and negative perceptions about planting genetically improved poplar trees in the region create a division of respondents into Environmentalists, Knowledgeable, Challengers, and Supporters. Respondents from British Columbia and Manitoba are identified as Environmentalists and Challengers, respectively, of the new policy of planting genetically improved poplar trees on public land. Conversely, respondents from Saskatchewan and Alberta are identified as Supporters and Knowledgeable, respectively, of the new policy. Refereed/Peer-reviewed