Meeting: Cities Feeding People : Lessons Learned from Projects in African Cities, 21-25 June 1998, Nairobi, KE

The recent increase in urban areas has stimulated landscape urbanization. One of the ways to study this process is an analysis based on the structure of land cover. The aim of this paper is to assess the intensity of the urban landscape on the basis of the CORINE in the seven largest metropolitan areas in Poland and in the Ruhr Metropolis in Germany. To this end, an urban landscape intensity indicator (ULII) was used based on Corine Land Cover at three levels of detail: the metropolitan area, municipalities and hexagons.

Proper functioning land information (LI) plays an indispensable role in supporting land-related decision-making processes. In recognition to this, substantial efforts have been made in Ethiopia to develop and modernize land information both in urban and rural land administration sectors.

Global food production must ramp up in the face of enormous challenges. We are all familiar with many of the key metrics surrounding the central food security challenge: By the year 2050, the earth’s population is expected to soar from the current 7bn about 9.6bn. It is estimated that in the next 40 to 50 years, we will need to produce as much food as was necessary in the previous 10,000.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) work with nature to benefit both natural ecosystems and the people that depend on them. By putting nature at the centre, NbS address a range of societal challenges: protecting, sustainably managing or restoring natural or modified ecosystems and supporting their health, function and biodiversity.

The research collated in this brief confirms that NbS deliver simultaneously multiple benefits and shows the wide-ranging beneficial impacts of scaling up their implementation across Europe.

Life on Earth depends on healthy soils. The soil under our feet is a living system – home to many fascinating plants and animals, whose invisible interactions ensure our well-being and that of the planet. Soils provide us with nutritious food and other products as well as with clean water and flourishing habitats for biodiversity. At the same time, soils can help slow the onset of climate change and make us more resilient to extreme climate events such as droughts and floods. Soils preserve our cultural heritage and are a key part of the landscapes that we all cherish.

This paper engages in a discussion between regulationists and urban scientists with the aim of bringing awareness ofthe growing role of property markets as drivers of contemporaneous capitalist regimes — a dimension that has notbeen given proper consideration by the French Regulation School. The case of China exemplifies the centrality of landin macroeconomic dynamics. The paper explores this centrality trough the prism of the Development State (DS), aframework that sets China's experience in the broader context of Northeast Asia.

We study the developable land market in French periurban and rural areas under urban influence. Theoretical aspects and empirical results are derived from urban economics to analyse the main determinants of the price of developable land: distance from the urban centres, population, inhabitantsí income, etc. We focus especially on option values that come from irreversibility of development of farmland into residential plots, with uncertainly and inflow of information from the market.

The price of land in Honolulu is higher than in any other major U.S. urban area. In this paper we examine several determinants of the supply and demand for land and discuss their likely influence on Honolulu's land price. We utilize comparisons between demand and supply conditions in Honolulu and in the 40 most populous U.S. urban areas to ascertain the strength of the respective determinants. Our regression results confirm that natural and institutional constraints restricting the supply of land play an important role in determining price in Honolulu and in the 40-city sample.

Studies evaluating potential of Green Infrastructure (GI) development using traditional Boolean logic-based multi-criteria analysis methods are not capable of predicting future GI development under dynamic urban scape.

This paper synthesizes and extends the results of urban land market studies carried out in three Brazilian cities – Brasília, Curitiba and Recife. The purpose of the studies is to empirically assess the performance of urban land markets in different cities and to gauge the feasibility of applying the Land Market Assessment methodology in Brazil.