Sustainable Land Use

Course goals

1. understand various sustainable land use issues and policy objectives for blue, green, red and grey infrastructure;
2. identify and explain (possible) tensions between these policy objectives;
3. explain and discuss theories of governance and science-policy interactions concerning sustainable land use;
4. analyse and evaluate policy objectives on the extent to which they enable sustainable land use;

 The following academic skills are developed during the course: academic thinking and reasoning, academic writing, and oral presentation.

Content

Space is scarce, especially in dense urban areas where public and private actors strive to combine multiple social functions such as housing, economic activities, transportation, and recreation. This scarcity leads to competition among these functions, stakeholders, and interests to secure the space they need. The competition can focus on quantitative issues, like dividing the number of acres, or qualitative issues, such as improving livability or preserving greenery, making sustainable land use challenging.

In recent decades, land use planning and policy have increasingly focused on more sustainable development. The main aim of sustainable land use is to ensure that current land-use plans consider their impacts on the livability of future generations. This requires considering strong economic interests, such as housing, infrastructure, and business parks as well as weaker interests like nature development and water management, a complex process which is confronted with several challenges.

In this course, we introduce four types of spatial infrastructure that are socio-economically relevant: red (houses, offices, retail), green (parks, nature conservation areas, forests), blue (rivers, seas, and oceans), and grey (energy, transport, ICT). We explore sustainability challenges for each infrastructure from an international perspective and identify and analyze conflicts between them. Governance and science-policy interactions are key perspectives used to understand these challenges and conflicts.

This course is a third-year track-specific course in the ‘Governance and Societal Transformation’ track of the BSc Global Sustainability Science (GSS). It focuses on European challenges in governance and science-policy interactions, addressing the European institutional context.