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17 Ways Forward to Explore Sustainable Land Use in an Urbanizing World Anette Reenberg and Karen C. Seto Introduction Our original ambition for this Ernst Strüngmann Forum was to refine existing and develop new perspectives to address and better understand the challenges and opportunities for sustainable land use in the 21st century. Whereas sustainable land use is often considered to be a global issue, urban land use is often a local issue. By jointly addressing the planetary and local dimensions of land use, this Forum sought to develop a new conceptual framework of land change and urbanization that would explicitly identify how these two processes are connected, delineate pathways for sustainable urbanization, and expose the implications of an urbanizing world for global land use. The reflections and discussions that led to the ideas and suggestions presented in this volume all emerged from a shared concern: The magnitude and rate of change over recent years and the simultaneous trends in urbanization, economic integration, and emergence of new land agents require us to rethink sustainable global land use. This not only involves a reconsideration of how sustainable land use is conceptualized and achieved. It is equally critical to think about the implicit normative and fairness issues. These perspectives underlie decisions made about who has the right to use land, what types of data are considered relevant, and what types of analyses are considered appropriate. To address these issues, it was critical to go beyond the expertise of the core land science and urban research communities so as to bring together a much broader set of skills and perspectives from relevant disciplines—areas which also consider land use, urbanization, and resource governance in their inquiries . Radical advancements of a more conceptual nature seem to be important if progress in land-related research is to be made beyond the traditional plea for a higher level of cross-disciplinary integration. 334 A. Reenberg and K. C. Seto Once convened, we collectively posed a relatively simple question: Do existing frameworks capture the relevant connections and interactions that affect land use today? More specifically, the starting point for the Forum was to decompose the exploration of land use and look at it through four lenses that directly influence the ways in which land use can be explored with respect to sustainability (see Figure 1.1, Seto and Reenberg, this volume). While this decomposition was not meant to be the end goal or a proposition for the fundamental revision of the way we explore sustainable global land use, it spurred constructive dialog between the different disciplines, exposed novel perspectives , and identified crucial areas for future exploration. Fresh Perspectives One of the key outcomes from this Forum was a more comprehensive and nuanced contextualization of the growing competition for, access to, and use of land. This stressed the necessity of going beyond well-established, placebased inquiries of land to explore flows and process. Five issues emerged as critical to internalize in future global land-change and urbanization research: (a) time and space interdependencies, (b) distal land connections, (c) the move away from territorial definitions, (d) revalorization of land, and (e) equity and fairness. Time and Space Interdependencies One important common denominator present across the disciplinary expertise at the Forum was the concern about issues related to temporal and spatial scale. For example, land-use legacies are acknowledged to add explanatory power to our understanding of trajectories of change in land systems in specific places because past processes shape current conditions and may constrain future responses . Meanwhile, contemporary land-use processes and patterns will affect future land uses because of path dependencies. Land-related processes may, however, also result in lagged or contemporaneous effects in distant places. In other words, places may be enabled or constrained in complex ways by local legacies as well as by their connections to distant places. Cascading effects and feedbacks that are triggered by changes in one place but appear in distant places also deserve attention. Divisions of space are becoming increasingly complex in the course of the land-use transformation, involving multiple jurisdictions (local to international), multiple services (production , biodiversity, protection), and multiple actors in unusual connections. Hence, to capture such complexities in our exploration of the transformation processes requires a new conceptual framework—one that goes beyond the current emphases in the scientific communities of land-change science and urbanization, respectively, and is both place-based as well as discrete in space [18.118.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01...

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