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Global demand is increasing for food, feed, and fiber; for additional agricultural outputs, such as biofuels; and for ecosystem services, such as clean water and outdoor recreation. In response, new agricultural enterprises are needed that produce more outputs from existing lands while meeting the "triple bottom line" of high performance in economic, environmental, and social terms. Establishing such enterprises requires coordination and development within three critical domains: landscape configurations (i.e., types and arrangements of land uses), supply/value chains (i.e., processing and utilization), and policy and governance. In this essay, we describe our efforts, as land-grant university scientists, to support coordinated innovation and enterprise development in integrated place-based institutions, which we term landlabs. We describe our experiences in three prototyping efforts and outline key features of landlabs that are emerging from these efforts. Land-grant universities have a central and crucial role to play in organizing and operating landlabs.

As the number of resettled refugees arriving in North American and European cities has grown in the 21st century, urban planners have largely failed to adapt their practice in ways that would allow more participation by refugees in municipal planning decisions. Interviews with urban planners and Somali refugees in the Twin Cities of Minnesota indicate that planners typically use public engagement processes that are confusing and intimidating for Somali refugees who may struggle with English, have little leisure time, and lack knowledge about norms associated with participating in these kinds of processes. After living under a predatory state in Somalia, many Somalis view urban planners as an extension of government and distrust them as a result. Urban planners experience more success engaging Somali refugees when they build relationships with individual community members and partner with Somali-led organizations to plan and execute participatory processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health impact assessments (HIAs) provide an attractive approach for those interested in injecting health issues into planning processes. While HIAs have been mainly employed outside the United States and led by professionals from the public health field, they hold promise for addressing the important dimension of human health in planning. This article describes the history of HIAs and their relationship to other analogous tools, reviews current theory and practice of HIAs, and discusses the role of HIAs in current planning initiatives. The authors suggest it is important to modify existing HIA tools so that they are perceived by planners as a useful supplement to current planning processes rather than a burdensome additional requirement. The authors close by discussing how HIAs present distinct advantages, providing a more specific focus on the important topic of human health and a further opportunity to more closely partner with potential allies from public health and related fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have identified group learning as both an outcome of effective participatory planning processes and as the means to achieving agreement on planning outputs and to building constituencies for plan implementation. This article examines the challenges of designing empirical studies of group learning in participatory planning processes that have strong internal and external validity and reports the results of a quasiexperimental analysis of how different degrees of participation increase mutual understanding of planning problems and solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University of Minnesota School of Public health, USA.