Economic and legal reforms have triggered waves of conflict over property rights and access to urban land in Vietnam. In this article I develop four epistemic case studies to explore the main precepts and practices that courts must negotiate to extend their authority over land disputes. Courts face a dilemma: Do they apply state laws that disregard community regulatory practices and risk losing social relevance, or apply community notions of situational justice that undermine rule formalism?

SUMMARY: Despite a centralized political system, nation-wide legal reforms, and similar high housing demand pressures, property rights have evolved differently in Vietnam’s two leading cities Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City during the transition period. Using ethnographic fieldwork and a hedonic price model, the study shows that the two land and housing markets price tenure ambiguity differently. The different price structures indicate the importance of norms, as socially constructed by local political interests and culture, in the efficacy of land title regularization programs.

While Vietnam's reforms provided some of the weakest legal private property rights amongst the transitions countries, cities like Ho Chi Minh City have booming domestic real estate markets. Interestingly, while most properties in 2001 did not have legal title, those on the market did advertise a variety of property rights claims. Employing a hedonic price model to analyse the pattern of prices at which sellers offer properties in Ho Chi Minh City, this study examines how this market values property rights.

Street trees, native plantings, bioswales, and other forms of green infrastructure alleviate urban air and water pollution, diminish flooding vulnerability, support pollinators, and provide other benefits critical to human well-being. Urban planners increasingly value such urban ecosystem services (ES), and effective methods for deciding among alternative planting regimes using urban ES criteria are under active development.

The recent decades have witnessed a significant increase in the population in peri-urban areas which led to a progressive transformation of peri-urban landscapes, and the reduced ability of agriculture to provide ecosystem services. In order to understand the complex relationships established in peri-urban areas between reference urban centre, urban services (US) and ecosystem services (ES), with particular attention to the landscape, a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) was carried out in the transitional peri-urban areas of six municipalities located near the city of Perugia (Italy).

Drastic growth of urban populations has caused expansion of peri-urban areas—the transitional zone between a city and its hinterland. Although urbanisation may bring economic opportunities and improve infrastructure in an area, uncontrolled urban expansion towards peri-urban areas will negatively impact the environment and the community living within the area. Malaysia, for example, has become one of the most urbanised countries in East Asia. However, cities in Malaysia are relatively small and less densely populated compared with other cities in East Asia.

Distinguishing between the ecosystems’ capacity to generate ecosystem services (ES) and the actual use of these service (ES flow) in ES assessment and mapping is important to develop an understanding of the sustainability of ES use. This study assesses the spatial variation in ES capacity and flow in the Mediterranean small island state of Malta. The services included in this study were crop provisioning, beekeeping and honey production, fodder and livestock production, crop pollination, air quality regulation, and aesthetic ES.

Over the past centuries, cities have undergone major transformations that led to global urbanization. One of the phenomena emerging from urbanization is urban sprawl, defined as the uncontrolled spread of cities into undeveloped areas. The decrease in housing prices and commuting costs as well as the failure to internalize the real costs associated with natural land, led to households moving-out into the urban fringe – resulting in fragmented, low-density residential development patterns that has multiple negative impacts.

The primary objective of this article is to review the evolution of urban land-use survey methodologies during the last century, with a special focus on the methodologies concerning field surveys that are conducted for urban planning purposes. Our review reveals, on the one hand, that there has been a steep decrease of interest in the further development of these methodologies over the last 50 years, and, on the other, that they have been seriously trivialized, as shown by the simplistic and empirical approach to land-use survey methodology in contemporary textbooks.

Current urban developments are often considered outdated and static, and the argument follows that they should become more adaptive. In this paper, we argue that existing urban development are already adaptive and incremental. Given this flexibility in urban development, understanding changes in the so-called ‘rules of the game’ which structure and change collective action, is increasingly relevant. Gaining such insights advances the ability of planners to deal with perceived spatial problems. The aim of this paper is twofold.

It is essential to understand how urban plans affect urban growth patterns in order to improve current urban planning and management systems. Few studies have been conducted to analyse urban growth patterns of Shenzhen, an international megacity located in southern China, but none of them revealed the relationships between urban planning and urban growth patterns. This study explores the effects of urban master plans on urban growth patterns in different plan periods in Shenzhen. We first quantified the urban growth patterns comparing pixel- and patch-based methods.

Much of the research on urbanization has focused on how rural populations move to cities for work opportunities. This paper takes a different perspective on the relations between rural populations and urbanization. The livelihoods of rural dwellers on the outskirts of the city of Bogotá in Colombia are increasingly affected by the expansion of urban activities and infrastructure. Therefore, urbanization takes place in the areas of residence of the rural populations; these people do not migrate to the city but, rather, the city migrates to them.