In recent years, the rapid improvement in the urbanization level of the Central Plains urban agglomeration is bound to bring about significant changes in urban land expansion and economic development. However, at present, there is little attention paid to the research on the spatiotemporal interaction characteristics of urban expansion and the interaction between urban expansion and economic development in this region, and existing research lacks a geographical analysis perspective.

Global environmental changes are multifactorial and affected by multiple forms of land use. For this reason, and also in view of the current world climate scenario, they have become highly relevant and are subject to analysis and discussions on the best uses of land. The research presented here offers a systematic analysis on the priorities related to the multiple uses of land and their implications in urban planning. An exploratory and descriptive analysis is used with a qualitative approach based in a systematic literature review.

Against the background of Chinese decentralization, the preferences and choices of local governments significantly affect the scale and structure of urban construction land supply. Due to the shortage of financial funds and the political performance pursuit of local governments, environmental decentralization gives local governments greater autonomy in environmental management, and increases the possibility for local governments relying on land transfer income to make up for the financial gap and provide public goods and services.

Green development is necessary for building high-quality modern economic systems. Due to limited land resources, ensuring the ecological benefits will not be damaged while developing the economy is necessary, as is improving urban land green use efficiency (ULGUE). Lanzhou-Xining Urban Agglomeration is a crucial urban agglomeration in the upper reaches of the Yellow River Basin. The improvement of ULGUE can promote the integrated management of the region’s land and achieve harmonious development with the social economy.

Assessing the impacts and drivers of urban expansion on terrestrial carbon storage (TCS) is important for urban ecology and sustainability; however, a unified accounting standard for carbon intensity and research on the drivers and economic value of TCS changes are lacking. Here, urban expansion and TCS in the Yangtze River Delta were simulated based on Patch-generating Land Use Simulation and Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs models; scenario simulation; Literature, Correction, Ratio, Verification carbon intensity measurement; and land use transfer matrix methods.

Carbon emissions increase the risk of climate change. As one of the primary sources of carbon emissions, road traffic faces a significant challenge in terms of reducing carbon emissions. Many studies have been conducted to examine the impacts of cities on carbon emissions from the perspectives of urbanization, population size, and economics. However, a detailed understanding of the relationship between road traffic and urban carbon emissions is lacking due to the lack of a reasonable set of road traffic metrics.

This paper explores the specific “authoritarian” type of adaptive governance of urban regeneration using the example of Guangzhou city as the frontier of China’s reforms. As opposed to the “democratic” type of adaptive governance with its bottom-up policy initiations, community autonomy, polycentric power, participation in decision making, and self-organized policy actors, adaptive governance in Guangzhou is based on top-down decision making and implementation of public authorities’ solutions with the high role of political considerations.

Urban Green Spaces (UGS) contribute to the sustainable development of the urban ecosystem, positively impacting quality of life and providing ecosystem services and social benefits to inhabitants. For urban planning, mapping and quantification of UGS become crucial. So far, the contribution of private green spaces to ecosystem services in urban areas has yet to be studied. At the same time, in many Italian cities, they represent a considerable part of the urban green cover.

Improving urban land use efficiency is a feasible way to realize sustainable development and alleviate urban land pressure on the city. The main purpose of this article is to measure the urban land use efficiency of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and explore its evolutionary trends and influencing factors, so as to provide references for policy formulation to promote efficient land use and sustainable development.

Urbanization is one of the major threats to the dynamic inheritance of the agricultural heritage system (AHS). The ability to achieve sustainable development in intra-urban areas is an essential proposition related to the innovation of AHS conservation principles. The Haizhu high bed-low ditch agroecosystem (HHBLDA), a China-Nationally Important Agricultural Heritage System site located at the center of Guangzhou City, is taken as an example in this study.

Industrial agglomeration is one of the primary driving factors in city creation, and the improvement of urban land green use efficiency (ULGUE) is an important part in green development. This study concentrates on the impact of industrial agglomeration on ULGUE in the process of urbanization. Based on the panel data of 283 cities in China from 2003 to 2019, this paper constructs a super efficiency SBM-DEA model including unexpected outputs to evaluate ULGUE.

With the intensification of the contradiction between living space and population growth, it is necessary to improve the effectiveness of urban residential land allocation. This study systematically reviews 169 papers following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol to collect and collate the contributing factors that affecting the supply of and demand for urban residential land for different countries, and a statistical analysis of long-term series data is conducted to further verify the rationality of the contributing factors.