Speaker
Description
Reducing land take is indispensable for climate protection, biodiversity, flood prevention and food security. Land take – understood as the conversion of land to artificial surfaces – is a pressing issue in the peri-urban areas, where agricultural land and housing developments meet and pressure for land reallocation is particularly high. This dissertation project explores to the role of peri-urban regions in achieving soil protection goals and highlights the need for integrated strategic plans. It examines their potentials to foster soil conservation and socio-spatial transformation. This research focus on the process level: How can strategic planning processes be designed to reduce land take and encourage social-spatial transformations in peri-urban regions?
Austria has an extraordinarily high rate of land take, consuming approximately 11 hectares per day. The increasing scarcity of high-quality soils highlights the urgency of immediate action. Environmental organisations and renowned experts advocate for a ’no net land take target’. This means land take should not exceed ‘reverse land take’ — the conversion of artificial surfaces back into (semi-)natural land (ESPON, 2024). Land take is especially high in peri-urban regions, where land policy instruments are applied less frequently and less effectively. Structural deficits, such as fragmented competencies and the lack of quantitative targets, hinder the implementation of sustainable and just land policies. Addressing these challenges, scientists and planners need to engage also with (and improve) existing instruments and processes.
Sustainable land policy requires coordination across all planning levels, instruments and stakeholders. Regional planning bridges national objectives and local land-use planning and coordinates intermunicipal planning actions. In this context, integrated strategic plans — such as regional programs and concepts — are gaining importance by the coordination of regulatory measures and actions for the transformation of the existing fabric. As soil protection is an ongoing regional responsibility, planning concepts need to be long-term oriented, robust in their objectives and flexible in their implementation. Using planning culture (Othengrafen, 2014) as an analytical framework, this research examines three strategic planning processes and their impact on land consumption:
1. The “Regional programme Pongau” (2024) is a formal instrument that sets spatial regulations for municipalities while integrating a regional strategy for bioeconomy and circular economy.
2. The “Regional guideline for the region of Mödling” (2023) was developed through a communicative planning process and evolved into a legally binding regional program.
3. The “Action program for activating vacant properties and town recovery” for the region of Strudengau Nord (2024) prepared a regional strategy to support funding instruments for building revitalization and brownfield redevelopment.
These cases illustrate different approaches to soil protection and spatial transformation at a regional level. They vary in their combination of development impulses and regulatory determinations. Each case is innovative in showing a different way towards implementation of methods and also in its process organization. Given that each region is unique, with its own set of potentials and challenges, planning processes need to be tailored accordingly. Designing planning processes must be taken as a creative task. By comparing these cases, this research aims to identify key learnings for developing task-specific strategic planning processes that contribute to no net land take.
References
Othengrafen, F. (2014). The Concept of Planning Culture: Analysing How Planners Construct Practical Judgements in a Culturised Context. International Journal of E-Planning Research 3 (April 2014), (pp 1–17).
ESPON. (2024). No net land take – policies and practices in European regions. Final report. https://www.espon.eu/projects/nnlt-no-net-land-take-policies-and-practices-european-regions
| Keywords | No net land take; Regional planning; Peri-urban; just land use |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
