Pedestrian zones are public spaces intended for the continued and safe mobility of pedestrians and people with disabilities, and they provide multiple benefits to urban areas. They counterbalance the densely built-up areas, decrease atmospheric pollution, increase available green or social space, increase walking and cycling rates, and facilitate active play for children. Done properly, pedestrianization may also increase local business sales. Greece boasts open public spaces and the pedestrianization of common roads.

Urban ecosystem services (ES) contribute to the compensation of negative effects caused by cities by means of, for example, reducing air pollution and providing cooling effects during the summer time. In this study, an approach is described that combines the regional biotope and land use data set, hemeroby and the accessibility of open space in order to assess the provision of urban ES. Hemeroby expresses the degree of naturalness of land use types and, therefore, provides a differentiated assessment of urban ES.

The geological, geomorphic conditions of a mountainous environment along with precipitation and human activities influence landslide occurrences. In many cases, their relation to landslide events is not well defined. The scope of the present study is to identify the influence of physical and anthropogenic factors in landslide activity. The study area is a mountainous part of the northern Peloponnesus in southern Greece.

Nature-based recreation is among the most relevant ecosystem services supplied by urban green infrastructure, affecting citizens’ physical and mental wellbeing. Providing adequate green spaces for nature-based recreation is among the main goals of urban planning, but commonly-used indicators offer a partial view on the issue.

In the effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to food, health, water, and climate, an increase in pressure on land is highly likely. To avoid further land degradation and promote land restoration, multifunctional use of land is needed within the boundaries of the soil-water system. In addition, awareness-raising, a change in stakeholders’ attitudes, and a change in economics are essential. The attainment of a balance between the economy, society, and the biosphere calls for a holistic approach.

Municipalities across the United States are prioritizing green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) projects due to their potential to concurrently optimize the social, economic, and environmental benefits of the “triple bottom line”. While placement of these features is often based on biophysical variables regarding the natural and built environments, highly urbanized areas often exhibit either limited data or minimal variability in these characteristics.

The widely applied Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) provides relatively simple and straightforward techniques to assess how well the attributes of a good or service perform in meeting the expectations of consumers, clients, users, and visitors. Surprisingly, IPA has rarely been applied to inform the management of urban public green infrastructure (PGI) or urban nature (UN) spaces. This case study explores the visitor satisfaction levels of people using a PGI space that incorporates UN, close to the central business district of Perth, Western Australia.

In recent years, a new era of interventionism has emerged targeting the development of African cities, manifested in ‘fantasy’ urban plans, surging infrastructure investments and global policy agendas. What the implications of this new era will be for specific urban contexts is still poorly understood however. Taking this research agenda as a starting point, this article presents findings of in-depth empirical research on urban development in Beira city, Mozambique, which has recently become the recipient of massive donor investments targeting the built environment.

This paper examines two periods of renewal in Washington, DC, USA’s southwest quadrant and their relationship with displacement. The paper situates this discussion within both the local historical continuum and globally-recognized paradigms, such as “the right to the city”. This article primarily serves as an overview of urban planning consequences in Southwest Washington DC based on extant academic literature and policy briefs.

Urbanization is a rapid global trend, leading to consequences such as urban heat islands and local flooding. Imminent climate change is predicted to intensify these consequences, forcing cities to rethink common infrastructure practices. One popular method of adaptation is green infrastructure implementation, which has been found to reduce local temperatures and alleviate excess runoff when installed effectively. As cities continue to change and adapt, land use/landcover modeling becomes an important tool for city officials in planning future land usage.

Interest in green infrastructure (GI) has grown in research, policy and planning in recent decades. The central idea behind GI is the understanding of the physical non-built-up environment as an infrastructure capable of delivering a wide variety of benefits to society, including the ability to preserve biodiversity; to provide food, feed, fuel and fibre; to adapt to and mitigate climate change and to contribute to enhanced human health and quality of life.

With the notion of landscape urbanism long neglected, interlinkages between ecology and architecture in the built environment are becoming visible. Yet, the diversity in understandings of the interconnections between cities and nature is the starting point for our research interest. This volume contains nine thoroughly refereed contributions concerning a wide range of topics in landscape architecture and urban green infrastructure. While some papers attempt to conceptualize the relation further, others clearly have an empirical focus.