Can Cities Drive Ecosystem Restoration: An Exploration of Innovative Land-Use Strategies
A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Urban Contexts and Urban-Rural Interactions".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 May 2024 | Viewed by 226
Special Issue Editors
Interests: community based development; urban sustainability; urban food systems; urban agriculture; PAR
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Cities are often plagued by a history of unsustainable land-use practices that have left large swathes of land polluted, while ecosystems and the services they provide have been pushed out and into peri-urban and rural areas outside of metropolitan areas. This also makes cities and peri-urban areas some of the most important areas of focus to improve unsustainable land-use practices and to recover lost ecosystem services. There is, in fact, wide agreement that cities and metropolitan areas must themselves become more sustainable and resilient in order to improve overall sustainability and alleviate development pressures on suburban and rural communities.
Some have argued that green infrastructure and urban agriculture projects are ideally suited to pursue the goal of urban and peri-urban ecosystems restoration. Others have argued that these solutions tend to be over-technical and in conflict with objectives that seek to bring nature back into densely populated urban spaces. Yet, others would argue that urban land-use policies are too disjointed to achieve the goal of eco-systems restoration and must adopt ‘Gestalt’ approaches that emphasize the whole rather than the parts of urban sustainability that are commonly defined by separate administrative units from transportation to waste management, economic development, and more.
This Special Issue seeks contributions from all of the different perspectives on urban eco-systems restoration with the goal of further exploring what land-use strategies are currently under way or proposed and to assess their success potential. We invite contributions from any academic field, as well as contributions that seek to explore the compensatory role of peri-urban and rural land-use strategies intended to support the restoration of urban ecosystem services.
Prof. Dr. Sabine O'hara
Dr. Golnar Ahmadi
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- ecosystem restoration
- ecosystem services
- urban sustainability
- urban resilience
- sustainable land-use
- urban land-use
- Gestalt theory
