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Peri-urban expansion patterns typically aggravate inequality and environmental precarity. Planners attempt to improve the quality and location of development by employing new tools that connect semi-private entities, national policies and non-governmental coalitions. Along the way, they overlook how action in the ongoing operations of local government offices employing the ‘old tools’ of land use regulation, zoning and the issuance of building permits often fosters the very patterns they are seeking to change. Using a sociological-institutional lens, this collection of essays examines how municipal land use staff create and sustain practices that interact with the growth pressures driving expansion, and the related spaces of possibility to improve outcomes. The information and data for these essays was drawn from field work undertaken in municipalities across metropolitan Guadalajara, as well as a review of official and other documents. The results are presented in a series of four essays that explore varying aspects of the institutional threads driving ongoing land use planning action. The first essay, "Ground rules: When daily practices among land use officials repeat to become 'gray institutions' of planning" examines the role of review by municipal employees and the presence of institutions. The second essay, "Making the ropes: How daily practices in a booming peri-urban municipality become durable 'gray' institutions shaping land use" analyzes the way prior experience creates precedent. The third essay "From archive to checklist: An ethnographic study of a municipal land use office in peri-urban Guadalajara" identifies an array of everyday collective practices in use. These include checklists, shared spreadsheets, rules of thumb, ways of talking, and archive creation. These 'gray institutions' strategically create and sustain power inside the municipality and with developers, as well as transmit and communicate values around municipal permitting and approvals of land use development. The last essay, “Play before the rules change: Building permit issuance and administrative transitions in municipalities in metropolitan Guadalajara, 2004-2020” identifies how local election-related changes and turnover generates uncertainty and can shift regulatory application. Taken together, the essays suggest that institutional analysis can be a powerful way to foreground action in planning – and that the day to day operations inside local government matter to the immediate and long-term implementation of regulations, plans and pressures on urban land use.

Master of Urban and Regional Planning

Ausgehend von den Thesen, dass die räumliche Planung ein Aufgabenfeld ist, welches weit über die staatliche Einflussnahme hinausreicht und kooperative Beziehungen sowie kollektives Handeln aller involvierten Akteure erfordert; die Aufgaben der Planung nicht ohne Governance und ein darauf ausgerichtet Planungssystem zu bewältigen sind; die räumliche Planung, Planungssysteme sowie Akteure jedoch nicht adäquat auf dieses Planungsverständnis ausgerichtet sind und sich deswegen weiterentwickeln müssen, fokussiert die vorliegende Arbeit partizipative und governance-orientierte Ansätze zur Weiterentwicklung der räumlichen Planung. Ziel ist es, kontextspezifisch die Implikationen einer, auf Governance ausgerichteten Planung für die involvierten Stakeholder, den Planungsprozess und das Planungssystem aufzuzeigen. Grundlage hierfür bildete ein partizipativer und governance-orientierter Ansatz zur Weiterentwicklung der räumlichen Planung. Anhand eines konkreten Falls aus dem Südosten Mexikos konnte Governance im Bereich der räumlichen Planung kontextbezogen operationalisiert werden. Indem das gesamte Spektrum der raumrelevanten Akteure in die Operationalisierung einbezogen wurde, konnten die verschiedenen Interessen, Perspektiven und Blickwinkel der räumlichen Planung extrahiert werden. Basierend auf den hieraus abgeleiteten Zielvorstellungen der raumrelevanten Akteure erfolgte eine ex post Betrachtung von zwei kürzlich durchgeführten Planungsprozessen in den mexikanischen Gemeinden Candelaria und Calakmul. Aus dieser konnten wichtige Vorschläge zur Weiterentwicklung der räumlichen Planung abgeleitet werden. Erhebt die räumliche Planung den Anspruch, an die Gegebenheiten des Raumes angepasste und an den Zielvorstellungen der Akteure ausgerichtete Verfahren einzusetzen, bietet sich eine formative Anwendung partizipativer und governance-orientierter Ansätze an. Am Anfang eines Planungsprozesses könnten somit die Zielvorstellungen der raumrelevanten Akteure gegenüber der Planung kommuniziert werden. Im selben Moment kann das notwenige Basiswissen zur räumlichen Planung vermittelt werden. Der in der vorliegenden Arbeit vorgestellte Ansatz könnte mit einigen Modifikationen die Grundlage hierfür bilden.

1 Abstract This thesis analyzes and describes legal possibilities, which are given to the public for participation in land-use planning. The aim of this thesis is to reach to conclusion, if the public can, as one of the subjects of land-use planning, play a crucial role in this matter or if her role is rather marginal. The author firstly defines the basic terms as "public" and "land-use planning". Besides, he outlines the issue of the status of environmental associations, which is one of the main topics of this thesis. Subsequently, he categorizes land-use planning tools into conceptional and implementation tools. Further, he continues with basic characteristic of individual tools and their mutual relations. For each tool, he describes its function, content and typical features. In following chapters, author detailly describes and analyzes concrete public possibilities, means and tools for participation in land-use planning. He always doing so in the relation to specific land-use planning tools. The analysis is not limited only to the current state of legislation, but also examines its development since the adoption of the Building Act in 2007. The crucial object of the analysis is the relevant court case law, which is in this thesis detailly described and discussed and which in last few years has undergone...

Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) has for a long time been used in transport planning, but it is often questioned. One main argument against CBA is that the results depend largely on assumptions regarding one or a few input factors, as for example the future fuel price or valuation of CO2 emissions. The three papers included in this thesis investigate some aspects of uncertainty in transport CBA calculations. The two first papers explore how changes in input data assumptions affect the CBA ranking of six rail and road investments in Stockholm. The first paper deals with the effect of different land-use assumptions while the second deals with the influence of economic growth, driving cost and public transport fare. The third paper investigates how alternative formulations of the public transport mode choice and route choice affect travel flows, ticket revenues and consumer surplus. These are important factors previously known to affect CBA results. The findings of the first two papers suggest that CBA results are robust concerning different land-use scenarios and single input factors. No change in rank between a road and a rail object is observed in the performed model calculations, and only one change between two road objects. The fact that CBA results seem robust regarding input assumptions supports the use CBA as a tool for selecting transport investments. The results in the third paper indicate that if there is detailed interest in, for example, number of boardings and ticket income from a certain transit line, or the total benefit of a price change, a more detailed formulation of the public transport mode choice and route choice will provide more reliable results. On the other hand, this formulation requires substantially more data on the transit line and price structure than the conventional formulation used in Swedish transport planning, especially in areas with many different pricing systems. / <p>QC 20150414</p>

Ecosystem services are the varied goods and benefits provided by ecosystems that make human life possible. This concept has fostered scientific explorations of the services that nature provides to people with the goal of sustaining those services for future generations. As the world becomes increasingly urban, ecosystems are reshaped, and services are degraded. Provisioning and regulating ecosystem services, landscape planning, decision making, and agricultural systems and technologies play a distinctive role in feeding and sustaining the expanding urban population. Hence, the integrated assessment of these coupled components is necessary to understand food security and sustainable development. Nevertheless, frameworks that incorporate ecosystem services, urbanization, and human wellbeing are still scarce due to several conceptual and methodological gaps that challenge this assessment. As a consequence, these frameworks are not operationalized, and ecosystem services rarely receive proper attention in decision making. This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of the role of ecosystem services at the landscape level and provides an approach for operationalizing decisions that affect sustainable practices and human wellbeing.

Although deforestation remains widespread in the tropics, many places are now experiencing significant forest recovery, offering an optimistic outlook for natural ecosystem recovery and carbon sequestration. Natural forest regeneration is a key component of global ecosystem restoration scenarios. Regenerated forests, however, may not persist so a more nuanced understanding of the drivers of forest persistence in the tropics is critical to ensure the success reforestation efforts and carbon sequestration targets. Furthermore, the maintenance of native forests, including young second-growth ones, is essential for the continuous provision of a myriad of ecosystem services that we, as a society, rely on. More specifically, native forests play a crucial role in watershed protection and forest cover loss via changes in land use can lead to deterioration of water quality. Ensuring a sufficient and adequate supply of water for humans and ecosystems is a pressing environmental challenge and land use decisions can severely degrade stream water quality and compromise water supply. This dissertation focusses on two pressing current issues, the dynamics of tropical forest regeneration and the effects of land use on water resources. First, I use a long-term series of detailed land cover data to study forest cover trajectories and persistence of regenerated forest in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (AF), a restoration hotspot. Secondly, I use 20 years of stream water quality data combined with land cover information to investigate the effects of land cover composition on water resources in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. In Chapter 1, I investigate forest cover trajectories in 3,014 municipalities and quantify the carbon sequestration potential of forest regeneration in the AF. I found that deforestation reversals were the prevalent trend in the region (38%) but concomittant reforestation reversals (13%) suggest that these short-term increases in native forest cover do not necessarily translate into persistent trends, which limited carbon sequestration from reforestation to less than one third of its potential. In Chapter 2, I quantify forest regeneration in the AF and study its persistence. I mapped over 4.47 Mha of native forest regeneration in the region between 1985 and 2019, of which, two thirds persisted until 2019 (3.1 Mha). The relatively low persistence of second-growth forests suggests a rapid turnover of regrowing forests under certain conditions. In Chapter 3, I combine stream water quality data with detailed and land cover information to investigate the effects of landscape composition on the quality of water resources in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. I found that human dominated watersheds had lower overall water quality when compared to conserved ones, with urban cover showing the most detrimental impacts on water quality, while forest cover was associated with a better overall water quality across the studied watersheds. Finally, in Chapter 4, I examine temporal changes in water quality and their association with land use and sewage treatment also in the state of São Paulo. I show that a large proportion of stream water samples failed to meet legal thresholds for at least one water quality metric and that urbanization and agricultural activity led to deterioration of water quality over time, while sewage treatment infrastructure was an important factor in improving water quality. Overall, my dissertation underscores the importance of developing policies that promote second-growth forest persistence to ensure the success of future restoration efforts. It also highlights the need to need to plan and manage landscapes to improve water quality and reduce the growing costs of water treatment, including restoring native forest cover, which is a cost-effective intervention to sustain adequate water quality.

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