Analysing trade-offs and synergies between SDGs for urban development, food security and poverty alleviation in rapidly changing peri-urban areas: a tool to support inclusive urban planning

Transitional peri-urban contexts are frontiers for sustainable development where land-use change involves negotiation and contestation between diverse interest groups. Multiple, complex trade-offs between outcomes emerge which have both negative and positive impacts on progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These trade-offs are often overlooked in policy and planning processes which depend on top-down expert perspectives and rely on course grain aggregate data which does not reflect complex peri-urban dynamics or the rapid pace of change. Tools are required to address this gap, integrate data from diverse perspectives and inform more inclusive planning processes. In this paper, we draw on a reinterpretation of empirical data concerned with land-use change and multiple dimensions of food security from the city of Wuhan in China to illustrate some of the complex trade-offs between SDG goals that tend to be overlooked with current planning approaches. We then describe the development of an interactive web-based tool that implements deep learning methods for fine-grained land-use classification of high-resolution remote sensing imagery and integrates this with a flexible method for rapid trade-off analysis of land-use change scenarios. The development and potential use of the tool are illustrated using data from the Wuhan case study example. This tool has the potential to support participatory planning processes by providing a platform for multiple stakeholders to explore the implications of planning decisions and land-use policies. Used alongside other planning, engagement and ecosystem service mapping tools it can help to reveal invisible trade-offs and foreground the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. This is vital for building approaches which recognise how trade-offs between the achievement of SDGs can be influenced by development interventions

An open and extensible framework for spatially explicit land use change modelling in R: the lulccR package (0.1.0)

Land use change has important consequences for biodiversity and the sustainability of ecosystem services, as well as for global environmental change. Spatially explicit land use change models improve our understanding of the processes driving change and make predictions about the quantity and location of future and past change. Here we present the lulccR package, an object-oriented framework for land use change modelling written in the R programming language. The contribution of the work is to resolve the following limitations associated with the current land use change modelling paradigm: (1) the source code for model implementations is frequently unavailable, severely compromising the reproducibility of scientific results and making it impossible for members of the community to improve or adapt models for their own purposes; (2) ensemble experiments to capture model structural uncertainty are difficult because of fundamental differences between implementations of different models; (3) different aspects of the modelling procedure must be performed in different environments because existing applications usually only perform the spatial allocation of change. The package includes a stochastic ordered allocation procedure as well as an implementation of the widely used CLUE-S algorithm. We demonstrate its functionality by simulating land use change at the Plum Island Ecosystems site, using a dataset included with the package. It is envisaged that lulccR will enable future model development and comparison within an open environment

Information technology and urban green analysis

It is well recognized that green area plays a pivotal role in improving urban environment, such as preserving water and soil, controlling temperature and humidity of air, preventing pollution, flood prevention, functioning as buffers between incompatible land uses, preserving natural habitat, and providing space for recreation and relaxation. However, due to pressures from new development both in urban fringes and urban centres, urban green and open spaces are seen to be rapidly declining in term of allocated spaces and quality. Without careful urban land use planning, many open spaces will be filled with residential and commercial buildings. Therefore, there is a need for proper planning control to ensure that the provisions of green spaces are adequately being conserved for current and future generations. The need for an urban green information system is particularly important for strategic planning at macro level and local planning at the micro level. The advent of information technology has created an opportunity for the development of new approaches in preserving and monitoring the development of urban green and open spaces. This paper will discuss the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) incorporated with other data sources such as remote sensing images and aerial photographs in providing innovative and alternative solutions in the management and monitoring of urban green. GIS is widely accepted in urban landscape planning as it can provide better understanding on the spatial pattern and changes of land use in an area. This paper will primarily focus on digital database that are developed to assist in monitoring urban green and open spaces at regional and local context. The application of GIS in the Klang Valley region or better known as AGISwlk developed since mid-1990's is currently being used by various organisations in the region. The focus of AGISwlk is not merely in providing relevant database to its stakeholders but more importantly, assist in making specific and relevant decisions with regard to spatial planning. It is also used to monitor the loss of green areas by using several temporal data sets. The method of classifying green and open spaces in the region is also being discussed. This paper demonstrates that GIS can be an effective tool in preserving and monitoring green and open spaces in an urban area. The contribution of urban green digital database in someway may leads toward landscape sustainability as to satisfy the ever changing society

Modelling and simulating change in reforesting mountain landscapes using a social-ecological framework

Natural reforestation of European mountain landscapes raises major environmental and societal issues. With local stakeholders in the Pyrenees National Park area (France), we studied agricultural landscape colonisation by ash (Fraxinus excelsior) to enlighten its impacts on biodiversity and other landscape functions of importance for the valley socio-economics. The study comprised an integrated assessment of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) since the 1950s, and a scenario analysis of alternative future policy. We combined knowledge and methods from landscape ecology, land change and agricultural sciences, and a set of coordinated field studies to capture interactions and feedback in the local landscape/land-use system. Our results elicited the hierarchically-nested relationships between social and ecological processes. Agricultural change played a preeminent role in the spatial and temporal patterns of LUCC. Landscape colonisation by ash at the parcel level of organisation was merely controlled by grassland management, and in fact depended on the farmer's land management at the whole-farm level. LUCC patterns at the landscape level depended to a great extent on interactions between farm household behaviours and the spatial arrangement of landholdings within the landscape mosaic. Our results stressed the need to represent the local SES function at a fine scale to adequately capture scenarios of change in landscape functions. These findings orientated our modelling choices in the building an agent-based model for LUCC simulation (SMASH - Spatialized Multi-Agent System of landscape colonization by ASH). We discuss our method and results with reference to topical issues in interdisciplinary research into the sustainability of multifunctional landscapes

Planning Support Systems: Progress, Predictions, and Speculations on the Shape of Things to Come

In this paper, we review the brief history of planning support systems, sketching the way both the fields of planning and the software that supports and informs various planning tasks have fragmented and diversified. This is due to many forces which range from changing conceptions of what planning is for and who should be involved, to the rapid dissemination of computers and their software, set against the general quest to build ever more generalized software products applicable to as many activities as possible. We identify two main drivers – the move to visualization which dominates our very interaction with the computer and the move to disseminate and share software data and ideas across the web. We attempt a brief and somewhat unsatisfactory classification of tools for PSS in terms of the planning process and the software that has evolved, but this does serve to point up the state-ofthe- art and to focus our attention on the near and medium term future. We illustrate many of these issues with three exemplars: first a land usetransportation model (LUTM) as part of a concern for climate change, second a visualization of cities in their third dimension which is driving an interest in what places look like and in London, a concern for high buildings, and finally various web-based services we are developing to share spatial data which in turn suggests ways in which stakeholders can begin to define urban issues collaboratively. All these are elements in the larger scheme of things – in the development of online collaboratories for planning support. Our review far from comprehensive and our examples are simply indicative, not definitive. We conclude with some brief suggestions for the future