Agricultural land-use change is a dynamic process that varies as a function of social, economic and environmental factors spanning from the local to the global scale. The cumulative regional impacts of these factors on land use adoption decisions by farmers are neither well accounted for nor reflected in agricultural land use planning. We present an innovative spatially explicit agent-based modelling approach (Crop GIS-ABM) that accounts for factors involved in farmer decision making on new irrigation adoption to enable land-use predictions and exploration.

Since the introduction of the current legal planning system, Polish land policy has failed to manage the designation of developable land. The oversupply of developable land designated in land-use plans and resulting from various weaknesses of auxiliary planning permissions undermines the creation of compact urban settlements. The article argues that, theoretically, the Polish legal framework of developable land designation management conforms with its more effective European counterparts. What makes it not work properly are the detailed regulations and their interpretation.

The value of land is determined by the locations’ attractiveness and the degree of direct land use regulation. When regulations are binding, e.g., when a restriction on the maximum floor area ratio exists, the land price can be directly expressed as a function of the maximum floor area ratio and local amenities. We show theoretically and empirically how this approach can be used to determine land values from rental prices of residential structures built upon that land. From our empirical results, we derive two main sources for a monocentric structure of land prices.